


Let the Current Carry Us

by perfectpro



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Drug Abuse, M/M, Magical Realism, Overdosing, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-08-16 17:56:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8111890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: Jack hums and smiles, but otherwise doesn’t respond. They sit in silence, and he bites his tongue to keep from saying anything. There is no sense disrupting this fragile peace that they have.Here is the deal he has made with himself: Jack is forbidden, until after the curse of the seventeenth summer. Kent does not want to do anything to let the gods know how they could hurt him the worst.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, I read a post that said "like cicadas, every seventeen years, Kent Parson screams for an entire summer" and somehow this was born.
> 
> Title from Josh Pyke's "The Summer", which hurts me a little more than it should.
> 
>   
>  _But every year it gets a little bit harder_   
> 
> 
>   
>    _To get back to the feeling of when we were fifteen_  
> 
> 
>   
>  _And we could jump in the river upstream_   
> 
> 
>   
>  _And let the current carry us to the beginning_   
> 

People say that it’s like the cicadas, that a Parson will scream every seventeen years for an entire summer. It’s not quite right. Only the males, and they won’t scream. The curse wasn’t that kind to them. Instead, they have a reason to scream.

Every seventeenth summer, a boy born to the Parsons will have a reason for screaming.

When Kent is born, he is the first Parson boy in two generations. All of his mother’s sisters didn’t let their boys go to term, instead sparing them the agony before they were born. His grandmother didn’t have any boys, but by luck or cunning no one knows. Her brothers have all long since been dead, two at their own hand and one from an accident his fifty-first summer that let him live just long enough to let the pain be the thing that controlled him at the end.

He is born July fourth, and his aunts wait in the hospital with baited breath as his grandmother hands his mother cooling ice chips in the delivery room. There is always some anticipation, at the birth of a Parson. For his cousin’s births, it was the worry that the doctors had been wrong, that they’d been carrying a boy into this world all along, unknowingly complying with a curse they could not see an end to.

For Kent’s birth, it is not merely worry. It is agonizing, this stretch of time without answer. They had all advised against it, wringing their hands when his mother had announced that she didn’t want to know the gender. They’d pulled old journals from the family history, reiterating time after time how their own uncles had suffered, leaving the world childless and alone. Still, Angelica had stood firm in her decision.

“He’ll be twice cursed,” his grandmother Miriam tells Angelica as her daughter sweats through another contraction. “Born in the summer. How will the gods know when to punish him?”

Angelica grits her teeth, breathing through her nose and accepting another ice chip when it’s offered. Her doctor will be back in the room shortly, and he’ll hopefully clear her for an epidural. “I’m hoping they’ll be as confused as you or I,” she whispers, clenching her hands reflexively, pressing nails into the palms. “And we don’t know if it’s a boy.”

Miriam frowns. “The gods have not been tempted like this for many years. He will be a boy.”

Miriam is right, and Kent comes into the world backwards. His feet slide out first, and the doctors and nurses all panic, but he comes out fine, and he opens his mouth to cry.

Before Angelica can reach for him, Miriam scoops him up and holds him, as she has done with her other grandchildren. “There, there,” she comforts Kent, bouncing him gently, “you must get used to this kind of pain.”

-x-

Kent grows up knowing about the curse. It is hard to keep a secret with so many matriarchs, and there are only so many explanations as to why they cast protective spells over him more often than any of their own children.

Aunt Helena, the oldest of his mother’s sisters, always looks at him like he’s done something he has yet to be punished for. She tells him bedtime stories of princes who were devoured by the thorn bushes, who did not live to save their princesses. She teaches him Latin roots and bats him away when he’s only interested in playtime. Aunt Eliza loves him dearly, she explains, but she is not so fond of his mother. She watches him run with her daughter and tries not to begrudge him this happiness. Aunt Lucinda is careful with him, as though he might break apart at the slightest touch. She teaches him the proper way to crush leaves, to ensure that the extract drains.

Miriam has hard eyes and does not treat him the way that she does her granddaughters. While Kent’s cousins can run in from playing with a scraped knee and come back with it bandaged and a protective spell over it, Kent learned early on to not bother with that. It wouldn’t get him anywhere.

“You’re different,” Angelica tells him, carding her fingers through his hair soothingly. They are long calloused from her work at chopping thorned vines for potions.

“It’s because I’m a boy,” Kent guesses, and he scowls when she nods. “None of the other boys in my class get treated like this.”

Standing up, Angelica looks away from him. “None of the other boys have a family curse, though,” she says, trying to make it sound like it’s a fun fact, a bit of family trivia that might come in handy later. She does not let her own guilt show through.

-x-

Hockey practice is his mother’s way of getting him out of the house. Or his grandmother’s way, he can never be sure. It gives his aunts five times a week where they can voice their grievances without the cause of them overhearing, and it gives his cousins time to play without worrying about how to entertain the boy.

The only problem is that he falls in love with the sport. No expected him to love it, and no one expected him to be good.

After so many seasons, Miriam suggests to Angelica that perhaps he would be better off not participating in the upcoming season. “You don’t want him to get too attached to these kinds of things,” she says helpfully, stirring her tea. “He only has six more summers left.”

“Seven,” Angelica persists, looking down.

This is the fight they always have, how many summers are left before the first instance of the curse. Born in the middle of summer, it isn’t known whether Kent’s seventeenth summer will occur in six or seven summers. It just depends on when the gods see fit to punish him, but Angelica cannot fathom her ten year old son knowing that kind of pain.

The last instance of the curse, her uncle’s fifty first summer, happened when she was eight. He lived across the country by then, she heard the tragedy through secondhand accounts. Her other uncles had long since been passed by then. To her, the curse is merely a story, one that everyone in the family has taken far too seriously.

Miriam hums, and Angelica tries to memorize the lace detailing of the tablecloth, a family heirloom that she or one of her sisters will eventually care for. When the time comes, she enrolls Kent in the next season and buys him new skates for good measure.

-x-

Hockey and home are two startlingly different environments. Kent is surrounded by women or men, never both, and never in ways that make them look similar. In one, he braids his cousins’ hair and listens placidly as they regale him with tales of their friends. In the other, he checks and is checked into the boards, builds up speed and feels the thrill of winning rush through his veins.

In both, he deals with his pain silently, unrelenting. His grandmother has taught him this much.

His coaches talk with him about Juniors, inform him of the interest that people have had in him. Kent is intrigued, but he has spent his entire life in New York, surrounded by aunts and cousins and guarded by his mother. Canada is an entirely different country, and the potential to end up so far away is almost overwhelming.

He takes the matter to his grandmother, after his coaches have pushed him further on it. This way, he reasons, they won’t have to have any family discussions about it, with his aunts talking about the benefit of him leaving. Kent knows that no one can be sure of the curse, and there’s always the worry that his curse could somehow affect their own daughters. He doesn’t feel the need to sit around the dining room table while other people discuss how his future should play out.

“Are you good enough?” Miriam asks him, watches him carefully. After fifteen years of this, Kent is almost used to it.

“They wouldn’t be interested if I wasn’t,” he says, willing himself to believe that it’s true. It is hard, sometimes, for a cursed boy to believe that he is any good at all.

She hums, and Kent isn’t sure if that’s a response or a way to put one off. “Do you love the sport?” she asks, and she looks like she’s curious. Her grandson is a mystery to her in many ways, most of them because she’s unwilling to get to know him lest he be pulled away so soon. The few games of his that she’s gone to, he’s played often, but she’s not experienced enough in these matters to know if he’s played well.

“Yes,” Kent breathes, unable to hold that truth back.

Reaching forward, she rests her hand on top of his own. Kent flinches almost imperceptibly. “Are you prepared for it to be taken from you?”

A reason to scream. At fifteen, Kent is only months away from turning sixteen. Starting then, the seventeenth summer. His mother refuses to listen to reason, keeps claiming that it won’t have been a full summer, he’ll have another year before the curse finds him. Miriam doesn’t believe such nonsense. It has been decades since the curse has been allowed to run free, and she does not think it will take its time with him.

Kent steadies his shoulders and lifts his chin. His hair glints in the light that filters in through the curtains. He is a beautiful boy, though she does not think he knows it. And perhaps it would be best to send him away. He has gone his entire life being told not to get too attached to things, but some things are unavoidable. He is devoted to his family and to this sport. Better for him to lose his skates than for tragedy to strike her family once again. Spells can only do so much.

“I have to lose something anyway; I will always have something to lose. I want to lose things on my own terms,” Kent declares, and for the first time Miriam sees something of herself in the boy.

She folds her hands over. The seventeenth summer. This summer, if she’s correct. He might not even go into the draft at all – there is no harm in letting him have this for such a short while. “Do as you will,” she bids him, and his answering smile is blinding.

-x-

The draft is early, at the start of the summer, and Kent is drafted in the first round to Rimouski Oceanic, the fifth pick overall. He will be sixteen when the season starts, and it such a windfall that even Angelica worries. Surely, the other shoe will drop before the season begins.

Still, his birthday passes and the rest of the summer does as well, all without incident. Miriam is disbelieving, Angelica is too busy being thankful to worry about the next year, and the aunts hold their breath until the first day of fall.

The seventeenth summer, in all of its horrible glory, waits for him just around the corner.

A Parson boy can be lucky, but luck runs out. Miriam has seen it enough times to know.

-x-

Aunt Helena drives him to Rimouski, her mouth a severe line the whole way. She reminds him to be careful, to keep in line, to not draw too much attention to himself. She meets his billet family and drives over to the school, where she makes sure there’s a Latin program before formally enrolling him. When it is finally time for her to leave, she kisses Kent goodbye on the cheek and doesn’t cry. He goes into his billet house, and the car does not drive away for some time. When she is back on the road, Helena’s eyes are dry.

In Rimouski, Kent is freed of a weight he didn’t know he’d been carrying. Another summer gone by, another year to go through without worry. He is ecstatic, carefree, weightless on his skates as he races around the ice and lets himself think that he might finally be where he belongs.

That kind of thinking is dangerous, for a cursed boy.

The other boys find him to be reckless in the best kind of way, always up for games of truth or dare or spur of the moment parties. He walks with a swagger in his step, he plays fast and loose with the rules while still keeping out of the penalty box. One player watches him, though, careful to not get too involved – there is something that he cannot fathom in the younger boy, that carefree disposition that he is so jealous of. It is hard to trust.

“I’m Kent,” Kent introduces himself, watching the other boy’s ice blue eyes tick up from lacing his skates.

“Jack,” the boy returns, and they clasp hands briefly. “I think you’re going to be on my line.”

That’s not true, because Jack’s been playing Juniors for a year already and Kent is still figuring things out, but Kent lets the compliment rolls over him anyways. “We’ll see if I get there,” he says, allowing a grin to spread over his face without hesitation. He is done holding himself back, stopping himself from doing the things that he wants to in the fear that one day they’ll be taken from him.

The second half of the seventeenth summer is still to come, he knows, but he cannot make himself care. If luck is portioned out, he has received more than his fair share, maybe enough to overpower the curse. It’s not true, and he knows that, but the hope springs eternal.

Jack smiles back, a touch smaller but no less honest, and they get in the habit of practicing together long after practice has ended. Their coaches are endlessly cheered by the site of them staying on the ice, a bucket of pucks waiting to be emptied as they discuss which drills they should run next.

It’s a serious friendship, but it’s a friendship, and Kent has never truly had one of those before. With his cousins, it was the family that bound them together, but the curse kept them all at a distance, their mothers’ worried voices ringing in their minds about what might happen if they were to get too close. In school, he had been too serious, too strange for his classmates to get along with. There had always been the fear of getting too close, same as always. With his teammates before Juniors, they hadn’t gotten along well, either, though for different reasons. He’d been too good.

With Jack, it is a give and take. Long hours on the rink pay off, and Kent is getting better than he’d dreamed. Good enough to fantasize about maybe, when he’s eligible, going into the NHL. There is no easy way to go about it, and Jack jokes that the hockey god only accepts blood and sweat as payment.

Kent has learned about the gods all his life, but his aunts never mentioned a hockey god. It seems a childish notion, that there would be a god for only one sport, whose purpose would be to reward those who served it. In Kent’s experience, gods are not generous with rewards. 

Kent laughs anyway, though, thinking it over. It would be nice, he supposes, if there was such a thing as a hockey god. It would only curse players who didn’t respect the Stanley Cup, probably, and he tells Jack that after taking a beautiful shot at the net, the puck bouncing out after slamming in.

“I don’t think many people would be cursed,” Jack says from the other end of the ice. “Most of the guys know not to disrespect the Cup.”

It may be a true statement, but something in it stings. “What kind of a curse would the hockey god bestow on people?” Kent asks, his voice echoing through the empty rink. There is a desperation in him, sudden and wild, that longs to have someone who understands.

Jack appears to think on it, mulling over what the worst curses could be for hockey players. “Maybe they’d be cursed to never get into the playoffs again,” he muses.

Kent shivers involuntarily. “Brutal,” he whispers, passing the puck.

Turning on his skates, Jack takes the puck up the other side of the ice and then starts back, dodging when Kent’s stick tries to steal the puck from him. “Maybe they’d just get their careers ended. Major injury, something they can’t bounce back from.” He shoots and scores, imagining the flashing goal light.

“Maybe something that would affect their kids,” Kent says, forcibly keeping his voice even.

Jack frowns. “I don’t think anything would be cruel enough to have a curse that’s passed down,” he says, not looking Kent in the eye. “That’s just little kid stuff, Kenny.”

Gravel fills Kent’s throat, and his mind flashes forward. The seventeenth summer, incomplete as of yet. He fetches the puck and angles it around until it feels right again. “Yeah,” he says at least, defeated. “You’re probably right.”

-x-

Jack is a year older, set to go in the 2008 draft because it will be the first year that he’s eligible. In February, he announces that he’s going to put it off a year. When the team asks why, Jack stays steady and resolutely informs them that he has an anxiety disorder and isn’t ready for that kind of stress. Kent’s stomach dips, though he doesn’t know why, and that day he makes sure to tell Jack that he’s always there for him, no matter what.

Pausing, Jack waits a moment before confessing, “They… I’ve been prescribed medication, but I haven’t decided whether or not to take it.” He looks off, jaw set as he tries to figure out how to continue.

Kent hesitates, sixteen and so very young, and he does not know how to navigate the minefield of someone else’s mental illness. His stomach twists, but he thinks about Jack in a cold sweat after a loss, Jack at a party, uncomfortable even among teammates. He tries to quiet his mind, concentrate on Jack in front of him now, cold but not alone. “I think these doctors might know what they’re doing,” he says, slowly and checking Jack’s expression quickly to make sure he hadn’t crossed a line.

It is a careful kind of dance, one that Kent does not know the steps to, and he winces in anticipation of having stepped on Jack’s feet. Jack simply nods, however, slinging his bag over his shoulder and waiting for Kent to follow him out from the rink. He is quiet, less so than when they first met, but he is no less prone to these moments of serious intensity that Kent has grown to anticipate come before decisions.

On the drive back, Jack lets Kent handle the radio station and doesn’t make any comments about the pop that blares out of the speakers, the noise tinny and comforting. He pulls into Kent’s billet family’s driveway, face still shadowed as he watches Kent grab his bag out of the backseat.

It is only when Kent reaches for the door handle that he speaks. “You might be right,” he says, and Kent can’t tell what kind of tone he’s using, shuttered beneath layers and layers of isolation. “I’ll try the medication.” He shrugs, going for nonchalant and coming out forced, but the effort is there all the same. “Who knows? Maybe it’ll work.”

Briefly, Kent thinks of the hockey god they joked about, of how Jack had reacted when Kent hypothesized a curse affecting children. Of Jack’s anxiety, doomed to peak whenever his father is mentioned. He forces a smile, hopes that it doesn’t come across as obvious as Jack’s shrug, and agrees, “Maybe it will.”

He hopes, deep inside himself, that Jack listens. That Jack will take the medications, that they’ll work. The seventeenth summer isn’t finished, and Kent knows too well the risk that he’s taking by getting close to other people. A reason for screaming. Terror builds in his bones, and Kent tries hard to keep it hidden, because no one can know. He opens the door and waves at Jack, smiling wide as Jack rolls his eyes and puts the car into reverse.

Inside his room, he bites his lip until he tastes blood, and then he calls his mother, waiting patiently for her to pick up. Instead, one of his cousins grabs the phone.

“Kenny!” someone shouts, maybe Daphne or Taylor. Vivian and Olivia are off at school, Amanda should be working, and Victoria is too shy to sound that exuberant first thing. Then again, he hasn’t talked to his cousins since winter break, so it could be Taylor and she’s just excited. “It’s Daphne,” she laughs when he’s quiet for a moment too long.

“Hey, Daph, can you find my mom?” he asks, praying that she won’t ask him what the hurry is.

Daphne hums, presumably looking around for where Angelica could have gotten to. “Aunt Angelica was just here,” she muses. “I’ll try to go find her, one sec,” she says, setting the phone down with a clatter.

A moment later, the phone is picked up, and a woman’s voice comes over the line. “Kent?” Aunt Eliza asks, warmth coloring her tone.

While still not his mother, one of his aunts is better than one of his cousins, and Kent sighs in relief. “Oh, thank God,” he whispers, sinking down into his chair and running a hand over his face.

“What’s wrong?” Eliza asks, instantly concerned. She pauses, and he knows that she’s mentally counting the months until the summer. “Are you all right? What’s wrong? Do you need one of us to come up there?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Kent hurries to assure her, wondering how long it would be until Daphne came back with Angelica in tow. “I was just calling to call. How are you?”

It didn’t seem that his aunt was buying it. “I’ve been burning mint for you,” she whispers, and Kent winces, “the smoke still rises.”

“You don’t need to do that. Summer isn’t for months,” Kent says, trying to comfort her. His stomach tightens instinctively at the thought, soothed nevertheless by the news. “Besides, I think I’d be able to figure it out if it was happening.”

She hums, distracted, and then pulls away. “Angelica,” she breathes, momentarily displeased. “Your mother is here, Kent.”

Kent pauses, waits for the phone to pass, and sighs when it doesn’t. “I’ll talk to her then, please,” he sighs, long since given up on asking them to be anything more than civil to each other. He waits until the breathing has changed before he finally gives in, sniffling as he hears his mother’s worried voice. “I’m scared, Mom,” he admits.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” she whispers, and he hears her high heels on the hardwood floors of his childhood as she makes her way back through the house. “What happened, what are you scared of?”

So he tells her, about Jack, about Jack’s anxiety, about Jack’s anxiety medication. “I’m scared he’s not going to take the meds, and that it’s going to be too much.” He pauses, unwilling to voice it before at last admitting, “I’m scared that… What if he’s my seventeenth summer?” he whispers, the words kept quiet in an effort to keep the gods from overhearing.

Angelica stops, and he hears her say something to one of his cousins so that she can be alone in the room. “You’ll come home for the summer. I won’t let anything touch you,” she vows, and her devotion makes his heart clench.

-x-

Jack takes his medication, and Kent holds his breath waiting for the summer to start. The days go by so slowly, though, and it doesn’t get easier to breathe as they approach the playoffs. Jack notices, watching Kent with careful eyes, and he resolves to fix it.

“I’m not upset,” Kent protests, looking around hopefully for another member of the team to walk out. It’s fruitless, of course, because everyone is either in the living room playing beer pong or in the kitchen freshening their drink. Besides, it’s too cold for anyone else to be crazy enough to step outside. Kent isn’t that cold, though, Aunt Lucinda’s warming charm on his gloves has lasted well through the winter.

Jack rolls his eyes, sipping at whatever’s in his cup. Kent peers into it doubtfully, trying to discern what kind of liquid it holds. He accepts it when Jack offers it to him, spluttering at the taste. “I’d have gotten you some if I thought you would have liked it,” Jack says, sounding smug.

It’s true, and Kent doesn’t act childish about it and kick his feet against the chair, but he kind of wants to. “You should have gotten me something, though, I’ve been out for hours,” he complains, only too happy to let their previous topic of conversation slide.

It seems that Jack doesn’t have the same plans. “No, really, Kenny, you’re freaking out about something,” he continues, ignoring how Kent freezes at his words. “You can tell me anything, come on. What’s going on with you?” He looks honest and worried, a furrow between his brows that Kent wants to reach up and smooth out, press against the skin until it sits right again.

For a minute, Kent stays quiet, watches Jack accept this non-answer and sink further into himself. He’s not to tell anyone about the curse. That’s been clear since he was a little boy, something Aunt Helena and Aunt Eliza drilled into his head until he could recite it from memory. He can’t tell people about the curse, or about the magic, no matter what. But Jack’s his best friend, and Kent curls a little into Jack’s side, thankful for the excuse that the cold provides them.

“Have I ever told you about home?” he asks eventually, almost hoping that Jack doesn’t hear him.

Jack hums a little, tapping his knee lightly. “Not much,” he says at last, careful. “I met your mom and your aunt when they came to pick you up for break, though.”

“Aunt Lucinda,” Kent remembers, thinking back on how Lucinda hadn’t met Jack’s gaze and wouldn’t comment about him the whole ride back.

“How many aunts do you have?” Jack asks, curiosity peering through his voice, gentle and hesitant.

Kent smiles, the expression spreading easily over his features. “Three aunts. Six cousins, and they’re all girls,” he informs Jack, watching the older boy grin lazily at him. “When I was little, I thought it was the worst. All those girls in the house, I told my mom I was going to go crazy, that we’d have to move if she wanted to keep me sane.”

“You all lived together?”

“With my grandmother, in this monstrous Victorian era thing. It’s so big that my cousins call me to say how empty it feels without me.” Kent pulls his hat down further, wishing that he had something to do with his hands. Jack is too far away, but he’s too close if he’s anything, and this is as close as they can be without having to throw out an explanation if one of their teammates were to walk outside.

Jack blinks, staring out at the yard covered in snow. “That sounds nice. Our house was always too big for three people. Maman says that it feels enormous when I’m here and Papa is on business.”

Three people in a house sounds almost unnatural to Kent, who grew up with the sound of high heels hitting the hall floor as a lullaby. He can’t imagine having grown up in any other way, no matter what he may have wanted when he was younger. “Sounds quiet,” he muses, and Jack tilts his head, considering.

“Sometimes it was,” he agrees at last. “I always wanted a sibling. Papa said that their hands were pretty full with just me though.”

Kent tries to imagine it, no cousins, just him and his mother in a small, one story house. They’d only need two bedrooms, which seems impossibly small. He doesn’t know how many bedrooms his grandmother’s house has, only that they’ve never had to share rooms and there have always been a few to spare as playrooms. Though that might be because of his grandmother’s magic rather than the original architecture. He’ll have to draw up a blueprint the next time that he’s home. 

“I mean, I know they’re all my cousins, but they all act like sisters. They’re coming up for one of the playoff games this year,” he remembers, smiling at the thought.

Jack hums and smiles, but otherwise doesn’t respond. They sit in silence, and Kent’s hands aren’t cold but he longs for human contact to warm them and he bites his tongue to keep from saying anything. There is no sense disrupting this fragile peace that they have.

Here is the deal he has made with himself: Jack is forbidden, until after the seventeenth summer. Kent does not want to do anything to let the gods know how they could hurt him the worst.

-x-

They lose in the round before the finals, and it’s not the Memorial Cup but their coaches are pleased all the same. After the game ends, outside the locker room, someone yells, “Parse, there’s some girls here to see you!” The entire team chirps him for it, but Kent hurries to get dressed and emerges, only to receive six excitable blondes running at him.

His cousins are ecstatic to see him, talk about his goal and his two assists and even mention a few of the plays they’d worked on – apparently, they’ve been studying hockey in their spare time since he’s been gone. Even Vivian and Olivia are have come, taking time off school to make the game with the rest of them.

It’s only when they’ve released him, after Vivian’s tried to tame his cowlick twice and Taylor’s made him give a play by play of the two minutes in the second period that she missed while going to the bathroom, that he notices his mother and his aunts hanging in the background. His aunts flank Angelica, who watches him with a soft smile, finally breaking rank and stepping forward as he rushes to see her.

As a child, he’d been nearly inseparable from his mother. When he hadn’t been with her, he’d been surrounded by aunts or cousins, and being away from them for this long has taken a toll on him, as unwilling as he is to admit it. “Mom,” Kent breathes, and he exhales evenly as he hears Angelica sigh when she holds him close.

“Looks like you’re doing good, baby,” she whispers, stroking his hair, still damp from the shower. “You looked so happy out there.”

And the thing is, he is happy out on the ice. It is so easy to lose himself, to hunt down the puck and plan a way to make it into the goal as quickly as possible. With Zimms out there beside him, it’s the easiest thing in the world. The coaches have been whispering about the 2009 draft, and with Jack putting it off a year he’ll be in Kent’s draft class, and Kent’s skin itches every time he thinks about playing against Jack.

They’ll make it through, though. Of course they will.

“How was the drive?” he asks, smiling so hard that his cheeks hurt. That prompts his aunts and cousins to surround them, talking about the two cars and different routes and seating arrangements and arguments at rest stops.

Twisting around, he goes to grab Victoria and bring her further into the group when he notices Jack standing just outside the locker room, grinning crookedly at the image of Kent swarmed by blonde, female relatives. “Jack,” he calls, waving Jack over as he extracts himself slowly out of the crowd. “Jack, come meet my family!” He pulls Jack in, introducing him to his cousins and then pausing. “Pay attention for this part,” he instructs Jack.

Jack arches an eyebrow with a wry expression, but he nods nevertheless.

Kent proceeds, pointing to his relatives as he goes. “This is my aunt Helena, and her daughters Vivian and Victoria. This is my aunt Eliza and her daughter Olivia. This is my aunt Lucinda, who you met last semester, and her daughters, Amanda, Daphne, and Taylor. And last but not least, my mom, Angelica, who you’ve also met before.”

Jack looks a little overwhelmed, and Kent is tempted to ask him to repeat the names, but then Jack just nods at everyone and says, “It’s nice to meet you all. Kent speaks very highly of all of you.”

Victoria leans in and pinches Kent’s cheek a little harder than necessary. “I don’t believe a word of that, but it’s so nice of you to say,” she coos, her nails digging slightly into Kent’s skin as he pushes her off. “He’s probably just relieved that he’s not surrounded by us anymore.”

Kent goes to respond, but he stops at a small noise that comes from behind him. He turns to find a tall, blonde woman smiling critically at them. Her eyes wrinkle as she takes in the scene. “Grandmother,” Kent breathes, standing up straighter, “I didn’t know you’d come with.”

Inclining her head towards Jack, Miriam bids Kent, “Well, aren’t you going to introduce us?”

Though his mouth is suddenly dry, Kent nods and rests a hand on Jack’s shoulder, maybe placing more of his weight with it than necessary. “Jack, this is my grandmother, Miriam Parson. Grandmother, this is Jack. We’re on the same line.”

Jack nods stiffly, holding his hand out briefly for a perfunctory handshake with Miriam.

Kent wonders what it feels like, for a person who has never been around magic before to come into contact with Miriam, the oldest and most powerful witch of a strong clan. Miriam has always commanded respect, and it seems as though Jack’s reaction is no different. He wonders if Jack can feel the crackle of magic beneath her palm, flowing towards her fingertips, restless and alive. When he was a child, Kent would demand to play patty cake for hours on end, just to feel someone else’s magic, beating as steadily as a heart.

Their hands separate, and Kent feels Jack’s hand move through the air to land on his shoulder. It’s a more natural fit than when Kent stretches up to reach him, and he relaxes slightly into the touch. He wonders if Jack can feel his magic, stuttering softly at a rapid tempo, lighter than air. It is nowhere near his grandmother’s or his aunts’, and probably not near his cousins’ now that he’s been out of practice for so long.

Angelica’s eyes travel between them, and Kent remembers with startlingly clarity that she’s the only one who he’s voiced his fears to. Miriam will know, undoubtedly, the way that she knows everything that people keep from her, but Angelica is the one with proof. Kent’s face flushes as she coughs, a light, discreet thing that makes him separate from Jack and cross back over to her. “Perhaps we should be going,” she suggests, leveling Kent with a glance and ignoring looks from her sisters. “We are leaving in the morning,” she reminds him.

Of course. It’s for the best, Kent knows. He can’t be around Jack during the summer

There’s a beat of silence, and then Jack’s fingers around Kent’s wrist, and it sounds like a confession when Jack whispers, “I was hoping you’d come to Montreal for a while. Maybe a week, sometime in June. I could show you the city.” His voice is low and rough, and Kent wants Jack to sound like that all the time.

He pauses. “We’re actually spending the summer at the beach,” Kent says, wary and watching his cousins out of the corner of his eye. His aunts have mostly departed, walking just out of range. His cousins linger, though, and Kent knows them well enough to know when they’ve found something interesting. “It’s kind of a family thing,” he lies, and he tries not to feel guilty. If this is how Jack will stay safe, it’s how it has to happen.

Jack’s fingers loosen around his wrist, and Jack nods stiffly. “Of course,” he agrees immediately, drawing back into himself.

-x-

On the way home, Kent is sandwiched between Taylor and Olivia, with Daphne and Amanda in the front seats. Angelica is behind the while, Lucinda next to her, and they are both steadily ignoring the girls’ teasing.

“Are you dating him? I mean, you definitely should,” Daphne informs him, three years Kent’s junior and newly fourteen and therefore eternally wise to all matters of dating.

Kent kicks his feet out, doing his best not to hit Taylor’s legs. She shoots him a glare anyway, pinching him on the arm and throwing her own two cents into the discussion. “Kenny doesn’t know how to date someone, he’d probably just awkwardly walk over and present a puck to the boy and walk away,” she snaps.

Actually, that sounds a lot more like something that Jack would do, but Kent guesses that this is where the differences start popping up, now that he’s been away from the family for a year. “Yeah, we could walk around holding each other’s sticks,” he suggests, tugging sharply on her braid even as she swats him away. “Fuck off, we’re not dating.”

“Language,” Aunt Lucinda calls back, glancing at them through the rearview mirror.

“Language,” Angelica echoes.

Amanda sticks her tongue out at Kent and squeals when Daphne elbows her in the ribs. “Do you love him, Kenny?” she asks, eyes as round and honest as she can make them, and something in Kent’s heart breaks for her. If they weren’t in the car, he’d probably swoop her up and spin her around until she didn’t look as serious. As it is, he stays in his seat and reaches over to pat her hand.

He thinks of the hockey god, of all the blood and sweat that he’s sacrificed, how it has to be worth something. The curse prickles under his skin though, and Kent steels himself as he shakes his head at Amanda. “No, I don’t,” he says, and prays that the gods don’t hear the lie.

-x-

His aunts are more wary of him than his cousins are. The stories are closer to them than to their daughters, secondhand instead of passed down like heirlooms, something to carry over to the next generation. Still, neither react to him like his grandmother does, Miriam’s hardened eyes following him around the house as he packs for the summer cottage.

“Have you seen my–” Kent starts, only to get cut off by Miriam’s thin finger pointing to the door, where his jacket hangs on a hook. “I’m almost ready, I think Mom and I are going to head out tomorrow morning.” It’s unnecessary to tell her this, of course, as Angelica has told her already.

Miriam hums, neither encouraging nor dismissive. She motions to the plants on the windowsill and requests of him, “Would you pull one of the African violets’ leaves for me?” Grabbing the cinnamon, she adds it to the pestle she’s using, mixing it in among the contents already there. 

When Kent offers her the leaf she asked for, she winces when she turns to him and comments, “It’s as though Lucinda didn’t spend months with you, teaching you how to devein them.”

It’s not that he’s unused to criticism, both on and off the ice, it’s just that Kent has spent most of his life trying to be out of the way. He didn’t ask to be an inconvenience from the day he was born, and he surely didn’t ask for an ancient curse to give him this kind of life. He works at deveining the leaf, careful not to touch it too much, movements clumsy after a year away.

The kitchen door creaks open, and the smell of lavender warns him of Aunt Eliza’s arrival. She purses her lips at the sight of them, barely bothering to say hello. “Mother, Kent didn’t come home to help you with potions,” she chides, words filtering through safely as she grips Kent’s arm and pulls him from the counter. “Have you finished packing?”

Miriam pulls her hair back and collects the leaf, checking it briefly before adding it to a pot on the stove. “There’s no reason he cannot help. The seventeenth summer is no excuse,” she says simply, not bothering to soften the blow.

Kent jerks, and Eliza does as well, accidentally yanking his arm.

Huffing slightly, Miriam stirs the leaf and wafts the steam away gently. “We cannot coddle the boy. It will come soon enough,” she informs them, turning back to the pestle. “Lucinda needs to tend to these plants more carefully. They require a more practiced hand.”

Though her mother is not looking at her, Eliza nods and pulls Kent closer to her. “I’ll tell her,” she says, not loosening her grip until they’re out of range.

-x-

The beach house is older than Kent remembers it being, although he supposes the last time he was here he was ten and too fascinated with the push and pull of the waves to notice the leaky faucets and quickly burnt out lightbulbs. Angelica does not seem to see the rickety fence, broken in several places and in desperate need of a new coat of paint. She does not care about the creaking floorboards or the broken garage door, too relieved to have finally found a safe haven.

“We’ll stay here,” she promises him, and the salt air of the North Carolina coast greets them when they open the car doors. Kent notices the words she does not say.

The last time they’d come, the whole clan had made the trek from New York to North Carolina. Seven children and five adults, Kent wonders how his aunts stayed sane for the trip with as much havoc as he remembers wreaking upon the place.

This is a peace offering or, well, something. It is the seventeenth summer, the one that his grandmother bet against, and Kent’s stomach is wound in knots by the time they get through the door.

“Decide on your room, and then we can go grocery shopping,” Angelica says, taking her own bags down a hallway and through a door painted red.

Kent decides not to ask, just hefts his duffel higher and walks through the east hallway, glancing in doors and trying to figure out who must have stayed where the last time they were all here together. It’s harder than he thought, because Aunt Lucinda and her kids must have been in recently if the chalk writings in Amanda’s hand are anything to go by.

When the east wing fails to produce anything interest, he starts over on the west wing, finally finding a small room, painted in cream. It looks clean, almost unused, and the twin bed has been made neatly. A desk sits in the corner opposite a dresser done in a light wood. He drops his bags and leans against the door for a moment, considering.

The seventeenth summer. This doesn’t look like the worst place in the world to have it at, but he wishes he weren’t here all the same. It’s a place he wants to be able to return to, and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to do that once it’s over with.

A reason for screaming. Nails biting into his palms, Kent turns away.

-x-

Angelica gardens, sweat dripping from her brow as the hot sun beats down on her. She weeds through the wild tangle of plants that has grown since their last visit, pulling the brush away to find the intended signs of life: strawberry and tomato plants, neither having born fruit in many years. It is hard work, and Kent watches his mother through the kitchen window, tracking her movements as she sorts through the plants and rids the plot of the unwanted.

Just sitting is proving to be too much for him. He is sitting, waiting, as though one moment the sky will start falling and his world will crumble. It is exhausting, to be on edge for days on end, knowing that it could happen at any time. When his phone buzzes, he jumps, even though it is almost always a text from Jack talking about how his summer is going. Still, Kent waits for the inevitable, time stretching before him like an unending wire, determined to pull him along no matter how much resistance he puts up.

“How does the curse go again?” he asks his mother one night, fear coloring the words vividly.

She pushes her hands through his hair, watching his cowlick break free of her grip and stretch upwards. “You know how the curse goes.”

Staring blankly, Kent nods. He does.

Still, Angelica obliges him and pulls over a bowl of fresh herbs. “They say that it’s like the cicadas, that a Parson will scream every seventeen years for an entire summer.” Plucking a mint leaf from the bowl, she crushes it in her hands and drops it like dust on the table. “It’s not quite right.” As she reaches for a candle, her bracelet glints in the light, shining slightly. It had been a birthday gift, many years ago. Opal, her birthstone. “Only the males, and they won’t scream. The curse wasn’t that kind.” Her eyes lock onto her son’s, and she touches his face gently. Her magic crackles beneath the surface, more powerful than Kent has felt it in years. Finally, Angelica whispers, “Instead, they have a reason to scream.”

His skin is too tight, too constraining. Kent forces himself to breathe normally, watching his mother’s careful fingers as she takes the mint and drops it gently into the candle. The smoke billows out, ascending from the flame, and Kent closes his eyes in thanks as he forces himself to remember what is still to come. “Every seventeenth summer, a boy born to the Parsons will have a reason for screaming.”

-x-

The ocean is too steadfast for Kent’s liking. Time drags on, each day longer than the last, and the ocean shows no sign of time passing. High tide pushes out, low tide pulls in, and Kent stands on the shore and watches the waves crash onto the beach. It is too much, to be here and so far away from his family, from Jack.

Sweats beads up on his skin, dripping down his chest and back as the humid air refuses to understand what the term evaporation means. Living in Canada has spoiled him, made him forgetful of the way that heat creeps over his face and down his spine, how sweat builds in his temples and slips into every crevice it can find. Even the winds from the ocean do not help when his shoulders prickle with sunburn and his freckles multiply with the exposure.

Anything would be better than the waiting. Even having the reason to scream would better than staying still and waiting to have the reason. Kent feels as though he holds vigil every night, sitting by his phone until he can’t keep his eyes open anymore, waiting for a text with news to come through.

Every text is a reason for panic, every call even worse. Still, the days drift pass and no news comes that is feasible. The smoke from the mint still rises, anyway, and Kent watches his mother do the tradition nightly, her fingers shaking in fear as she adds the leaf to the flame.

“Don’t you think that I would know?” he asks, late June. The official first day of summer is tomorrow, and his heart pounds in anticipation of what is to come.

Angelica shields her eyes from the flame and looks away. She casts a fantastic shadow, flickering in the light. “I will always keep you safe,” she promises instead of answering, and Kent’s heart clenches for a moment as he thinks of how it might be worse for her than for him. It’s a promise she can’t keep, of course, but Kent thinks that every mother makes promises like that, laden with good intentions as they reassure their children.

She can’t keep him safe. Kent is, like everyone else, horribly singular in the universe, no matter how many promises are made. 

It is the seventeenth summer, and the curse will come for him, mother or not. His relatives had mothers, too, and still the cursed came for them. Kent has read the journal entries, he knows how their stories ended. He turns away from her, blowing out the candle. “It will not always be up to you,” he informs her, and his hands shake as he walks away.

-x-

The summer solstice is a Friday, June 20th, and it marks the first day of summer. Kent wakes up in the morning before the sunrise to the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway, and when he gets to the window there are three blonde heads digging around in the trunk.

“Well, I would have packed it if you told me to pack it,” Vivian’s clear voice rings as she pulls a suitcase free from the madness.

Victoria turns away, pulling her hair up into a ponytail as she rolls her eyes. “Well, that’s obviously not true, considering how I told you to pack it. I was going downstairs, and you asked if I needed anything from the bathroom, and I said I needed it. And yet, it’s not here,” she trills, opening up the side door of the car to grab a few books out. She twists out of her sister’s reach as the older girl moves toward her, noticing Kent at the window.

There is a beat, and then Victoria shouts, and Vivian turns and shouts as well, and Aunt Helena bumps her head trying to pull away from the trunk to see what her daughters are yelling about.

Kent breaks out into a smile, racing through the wing to the front door and into Victoria’s and Vivian’s waiting arms as they chatter happily around him about the drive and the quality of rest stops on the way and how they’re so happy to finally be free of that car. It hasn’t been a week, but homesickness has always hit Kent the hardest the first few days before ebbing to a dull ache. He is so incredibly thankful that they have come, that they’d risk being near him now, even as he knows he should ask them to leave.

“Haven’t you been using sunscreen at all?” Aunt Helena asks, taking in his red skin and chapped lips, and Kent dutifully goes to hug her, grinning as she encircles him and looks upon the beach house. “Come on, we can get breakfast together before your mother wakes up,” she says, tugging him into the house.

He goes willingly, taking up bags when Victoria pushes them on him, dropping them by the hallway as they rope him into helping with breakfast, chopping onions and bell peppers as Vivian searches through the cabinets to find the right bowls for what she wants. “I can’t believe you guys are here,” he says at last, unable to believe that they’ve really come all this way.

A clatter sounds as Vivian drops one of the bowls, and then Victoria hugs him again, leaving the muffin tin she’d been greasing behind. “Of course, of course, I can’t believe we let you come here in the first place,” she whispers, pressing the words into his shoulder.

“We weren’t going to let you be alone,” Vivian informs him, and her tone brooks no argument. She looks shaken all the same, pursing her lips as he watches her from over Victoria’s shoulder. “You never have to go through these kinds of things alone. We’ll never make you go through a summer like this alone.” Smoothing her skirt, she watches him a moment longer and then nods in a gesture that reminds him how like Helena she can be.

It’s clear they don’t think his thanks necessary, but Kent feels it in the pit of his stomach, this pool of gratitude flooding through him all at once, temporarily washing out the anxiety he hasn’t been able to get rid of since saying goodbye to Jack. He just wants them to know, truly, how much it means to him.

“Hush,” Aunt Helena says simply, resting a hand on his shoulder as Victoria pulls off of him. Her eyes are sad, even as she looks away from him and down the hall. “Of course we came. Now, quiet. You’ll wake your mother.”

Nodding, Kent turns back to the cutting board in front of him, pulling basil leaves away from the stem and cutting them up, careful not to crush them. Helena watches approvingly for a moment before turning back to her own task of cracking the eggs. He smothers a smile, biting his lip as he knocks his hip into Victoria’s and listens to Vivian hum something that sounds like Schubert.

-x-

“How long are you here for?” Kent dares to ask, propping himself up by his elbows as he watches Vivian and Victoria race around the beach, acting like five year olds instead of twenty one and eighteen, respectively. They’ve been here a week, and it’s a fair question. He wants to know when he’ll have to go back into panicking alone instead of keeping it from three other members of his family.

Victoria stops at the edge of the shore, water still lapping at her ankles even as the ocean pulls it back in for the next wave. “We’re staying at least until your birthday. Actually, the rest of them are coming down for your birthday, but we’ll probably stay for a while even then.” She shrugs, unbothered, stretching the slightest bit at the feeling of the sun at her back.

Adjusting her hat, Vivian nods. “Classes don’t start up for me until mid-August. I hadn’t really put much thought into the plans. How long do you want us around for?”

Kent rolls his eyes and claims, “I’m getting sick of you already,” just to stop himself from being stupid and honest and saying forever. He rolls over and grabs his sunglasses wrinkling his nose when Vivian toes a bit of sand his way.

“Be polite to your elders,” Vivian coos with a grin before tossing her hat in the sand and sprinting off to the waves.

“My classes start early September, but I’m playing a recital at the end of August,” Victoria calls, pushing her sunglasses down her forehead to rest on her nose. “You’re welcome to come!”

It’s a nice thought, as Kent’s missed his cousins’ various recitals and award shows, missed their dance competitions and track meets and soccer games, and he wants to be able to go to them. “Pre-season conditioning,” he claims, wishing that he didn’t have to. At the same time, he knows that he should actually be doing more. He can’t just take two months off the ice and pretend that it won’t affect how he plays.

Victoria blows a raspberry at him, Vivian turning to see what all the fuss is about and rolling her eyes at her sisters’ antics. Kent loves them, loves that they’ve come here, but it makes him miss his other cousins. Olivia, constantly seated at the piano even as Victoria begs use of it, Taylor popping in from runs and leaving sweaty laundry in the bathroom, Daphne helping her mother by combing through plants to pull away the dead leaves, and Amanda, doing her damndest to drive everyone in the house up the wall. It’s good to know that they’ll all be here in a week.

-x-

Even with Victoria and Vivian, his mother and Aunt Helena, Kent finds that it is difficult to be genuinely distracted. The thing is, this is the summer he’s been waiting for his whole life. It just seems like something should have happened by now.

When he voices his concerns to his mother, Angelica sets down the rose she’d plucked from the garden and brings him gently to her. “Just be grateful,” she pleads, “and pray that the gods give you penance.”

“Penance for what?” Helena asks, voice sharp as she walks towards them, keeping on the cobblestones they’d laid out a few days into the trip. “Penance for being born?” She scowls at the two of them, extracting her hands from gloves as she overlooks the garden in its newly kept up state. Her scorn flows out from her, like a vine crawling from the heels of her boots outwards, slithering over the ground like a living thing.

Angelica’s face is in shadow as she takes in her sister’s form. “You know that’s not why,” she claims, though it sounds weak to her own ears.

With a sigh, Helena turns to her nephew, watching him carefully. “It is not penance that is needed, for you cannot repay the debts of your ancestors. Pray to the gods for mercy, that they would see you and know that the seventeenth summer is a punishment that need not be bestowed on anyone.”

Kent has heard the story many times before, thinks that it was always a cruel punishments, and it’s been lying in wait this whole time. While he was growing up, seventeen was so far that it was practically unimaginable. And yet, here he is, less than a week out from his seventeenth birthday, a knot in his stomach growing with each passing day. He nods so that Aunt Helena sees that he’s understood. “He probably shouldn’t have asked the queen to run away with him, then,” he guesses, twisting his mouth.

Silence passes through the garden, and Helena’s stoic face shows no sign of wavering. Impassive, she bends down and collects the rose that Angelica had set aside, inspecting it carefully. “We so often think that is true, and yet he only asked. The queen was the one who answered,” she says carefully, pulling her hand away and finding a droplet of blood on one finger.

Wiping the blood on the door frame, Helena spares one more look at them before going back inside, leaving Angelica and Kent to themselves.

After her sister has gone, Angelica sighs and meets Kent’s gaze. “Pray to the gods. Ask them for mercy, for penance, for forgiveness. Ask them to be spared,” she whispers reverently, tears rising. “Pray that they will not be able to find you.”

-x-

By his seventeenth birthday, the start of what is technically the eighteenth summer, he hasn’t had a reason for screaming. Angelica says that the curse must go by full summers, completed summers, meaning that they’re still on the seventeenth. Miriam, who came in with the rest of the family for his birthday, watches Kent with narrowed eyes, tells Angelica in a low voice that this wouldn’t be a concern if she hadn’t tempted the gods.

“It should have happened by now,” Miriam says simply, folding her hands and looking out the window, to where her grandchildren are running freely along the beach.

Lucinda takes the kettle off the stove when it sounds and pours it into the pitcher. “Perhaps the curse has expired,” she suggests neutrally, tying tea bags together and resting them gently on top of the water. The color floods in, straining out of the tea bags.

Pursing her lips, Miriam runs a hand along the windowsill. “The curse is old magic, older than we know. It has not expired, and you know that.” She gives Lucinda a meaningful look, and then she looks at each of her daughters in turn. They are gathered in the kitchen room, left alone to discuss what has been such a long time in coming and yet still will not actualize.

Beside her mother, Angelica looks out onto the beach, where her son is helping bury one of his cousins in the sand. “Why can’t we just be thankful that it hasn’t shown itself yet?” she asks, a little desperate as she turns back to her mother.

“You’re the one who brought this curse down upon the family again,” Eliza reminds her, sneering as she looks away.

There isn’t much to say to that, and they break apart soon after, going out to fetch children and remind them to get ready for dinner.

-x-

Jack calls that night, and Kent’s heart races in anticipation of the worst as he answers. “Are you alright?” he demands, worry showing through even when he tries to mask it.

There’s snickering on the other end of the line, and Jack answers, “I’m great, Kent. I was calling to wish you a happy birthday.” He laughs as he says it, as though the very idea in and of itself that Kent would have anything to worry about is crazy. It’s comforting, in an odd sort of way, and at least Kent knows that Jack truly is okay, not just making up assurances for the sake of keeping up appearances.

“Well excuse me for worrying,” Kent says, slipping into his bedroom and closing the door behind him. He really doesn’t want one of his cousins coming in while he’s on the phone right now. “Not exactly like you’ve been keeping me updated.”

The joke rings a little hollow, and so does Jack’s laugh, because of course Jack’s been keeping him updated. They text every day, and Kent’s heart jumps to his throat in worry every time his phone vibrates, because his luck is going to run out and there’s nothing in the world that can stop the seventeenth summer. Kent wants the summer to be over with, wants to be back in Rimouski with Jack, wants the first day of fall and the cold to creep in, wants to know what Jack tastes like. 

He’s kept his part of the bargain, and now he’s just waiting for the gods to fulfill theirs.

He kept away from Jack, as much as he cold, and they need to as well. If Jack is hurt by the seventeenth summer, Kent will never forgive himself. A reason for screaming, he thinks, and he feels faraway and cold. Jack being hurt… Jack… Kent doesn’t know what he’d do, he realizes, startled.

“I’ve got to say, I’m glad you’re at the beach for the summer,” Jack starts, his voice purposefully light. There’s an undercurrent of something that Kent can’t quite define, and he sifts through the words, searching for their hidden meaning before Jack continues. “This way, when you come back, I won’t have any more competition.”

Scoffing, Kent lies back on his bed and listens to Jack with one ear, the waves with the other. In a few hours, the neighbors will be shooting off fireworks. Vivian and Victoria will, too, if they’ve managed to keep the stash secret from Aunt Helena for this long. “Well, you know, I did this as a favor to you. Thought it would only be right to at least give you a fighting chance,” he lies, and he can’t seem to make himself stop smiling.

Jack’s laugh echoes a bit, and Kent listens carefully for background noise. He wants to know where Jack is, if he’s calling with people around, or if he’s escaped to be by himself for a short while, like Kent. He imagines the Zimmermann home, something he’s only seen in a few pictures that Jack’s shown him, with Bob and Alicia going around and preparing dinner. He can’t hear anything definitive, though, no short murmurs like conversations happening around him, no clanging metal like he’s helping get a meal together. For some reason, it’s disappointing.

They talk for a while, words winding through the phone line and closing the distance between them. Kent lies on his side, looking out the window. In an hour, they’ll probably do fireworks, and now would be the time to go hang out with his family and finally cut the cake, but the temptation to keep talking to Jack is too strong, so he does that instead.

“Tell me a story from Montreal,” Kent requests.

Jack doesn’t question him, but he pauses for a moment, taking stock and maybe figuring out what to say. “So yesterday, I was biking through the city, and I was stopped at a corner and waiting to cross the street when a car waved me on. I didn’t want the driver to have to wait long, so I road pretty fast, and I kind of hit the building across from me.” He laughs at the memory, warm and amused.

Kent closes his eyes and pictures it as best he can. “Gotta watch where you’re going,” he sing songs, thinking about how yesterday he’d walked into the side door because he hadn’t realized it was closed.

With a huff, Jack responds, “Yeah, whatever. Your turn, now: tell me a story.”

Immediately, Kent’s mind goes where it shouldn’t: _Once upon a time, there was a king and queen, and they were very happy until they weren’t_.

Swallowing, Kent tries to come up with something. “From the beach?” he asks, voice neutral.

“From anywhere,” Jack tells him, and Kent doesn’t doubt that he means it.

Unnerved by his near outburst, Kent goes for something short and sweet. And, most importantly, not off limits. “I cut my foot up on the beach yesterday,” he says, thinking of the shell that he hadn’t noticed peaking just out above the sand. “And it bled everywhere.” He does not mention that, for several horrifying minutes, he’d been afraid of the cut being too deep and having to amputate his foot.

Losing hockey as a whole, not to mention any other physical activity that required the use of feet. Talk about a reason to scream.

Jack chuckles mirthlessly. “You think you’ll have a scar?” he asks, curiosity piqued.

Kent glances down at his foot, at the bandage that’s red enough in areas to make a good guess as to where the wound is. “Probably. Might be nasty looking.”

Jack responds, but Kent can’t hear him over the sound of his bedroom doorknob jiggling around for a moment before the door swings wide, Daphne and Taylor grinning widely at him.

“We’ve got to cut the cake, and then fireworks!” they cheer, and Taylor’s grin goes positively feral when she sees that he’s on the phone. She can probably make a good enough guess as to who he’s talking to.

“I’ve got to go, Jack,” Kent says, noticing how Taylor raises her eyebrows at him in mock surprise, “apparently the family is insisting on even more family time. Looks like they can’t get enough of me.”

A laugh sounds out over the speakers, low and almost pleased. “Bye, Kent. Happy birthday.”

-x-

Packing is a frenzy, because seven women have too many bags to conceivably fit in a trunk properly. Kent ends up helping Olivia arrange them, treating the luggage like Tetris pieces in an effort to get them to sit right.

Sitting on the curb, Olivia watches his latest attempt with some interest before waving him off. “We’re going to need to rotate Taylor’s makeup bag, or else there’s no way that Amanda’s duffel is going to fit.” She hefts out the aforementioned bag and waits for Kent to rotate the makeup portion before attempting to shove it back into place. It doesn’t quite fit, though, and sticks out a good six inches.

“Okay, new plan. You guys travel back to New York without all of this stuff and just replace it when you get back home,” Kent suggests, leaning against the car as he tries to think of other options. “Also, why did Daphne bring a sleeping bag? She knows that we have beds here.”

Olivia rolls her eyes, finally reaching in and yanking out a series of stuffed animals. “From now one, Amanda is only allowed to bring one stuffed animal with her whenever we travel. Go tell her to pick which one of these she wants to take back.” She works the duffel to fit into the space that had previous been occupied by the animals, working some of the bags around to get it just right.

“I can be stupid sometimes, but I’m not suicidal,” Kent says, stepping away from the stuffed animals. “Get Taylor to tell her.”

“Taylor’s at the store with Aunt Lucinda, getting snacks for the ride back. In other news, I’ve never been so glad to not have siblings. I get the whole backseat to myself,” she says cheerfully, looking to the car that she’ll ride back in with Miriam and Eliza. “Daphne and Amanda are going to kill each other by Pennsylvania,” she bets, eying how tight the back seat they’ll be riding in is.

Snorting, Kent shrugs. “It’ll be by DC, I promise you.” He runs his foot over the rocks in the driveway, avoiding looking at her for the time being. In an hour, Olivia will be gone, along with Aunt Eliza and Miriam, not to mention Aunt Lucinda’s brood. “I’m glad you guys came,” he confesses, remembering standing in the same driveway over two weeks ago, saying the same thing to Vivian and Victoria upon their arrival.

Olivia stills, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “You’re family. We wouldn’t have missed it,” she says, sounding a little stiff but achingly sincere. “Besides, I had to make sure you could still run your scales correctly.” She jabs him lightly in the ribs, grinning.

“I play hockey – it doesn’t exactly make for a ton of free time to run the scales,” Kent defends himself, throwing an arm around her waist nevertheless and bringing her in for a hug.

“Who else am I supposed to use as a backup baritone?” she jokes with him, squeezing his arm. “Now come on, Grandmother said we need to help prepare lunch before we head out.”

He lets her tug him back into the house, leaving Amanda’s stuffed animals still resting outside the car.

-x-

August comes, and still the curse has not found him. If anything, it only makes him more nervous of when it will – there’s two months of summer left, true enough, but the scream will have to be worse for it to have the same kind of impact now. It’s coming, of course it’s coming, Kent’s never been lucky enough to get out of these kinds of things.

He’s used up enough luck as it is, avoiding it for as long as he has.

With August comes Jack’s birthday, and Kent feels like the worst person in the world, having to say that he’s still stuck with family, that they’ll see each other in a week when they come back for preseason. It sucks, but it’s not a reason to scream, and Kent feels the difference in his bones, knows that it’s best this way, that it has to be this way. It’s dangerous enough as it is, that he’ll be with Jack while it’s still technically summer.

Angelica worries over him, trying to distract him, but it’s impossible. They all know that it’s coming, that Kent can’t avoid it his whole life, the only left to do is sit back and wait for it to happen.

Even Vivian and Victoria, as busy as they keep him with games of beach volleyball and skim boarding lessons, can’t totally get his attention away from the fact that he’s basically going to be punished for being born. He is, and there’s no getting around it, and he wishes that people would stop ignoring it just because it’s easier.

“No, I don’t want to build a sandcastle!” Kent snaps at Victoria, unable to stop himself. “I can’t just build a sandcastle. I’m going through the journals, I’m trying to figure out what the others had to deal with.”

Her chin lifts, and Victoria wedges the door open with her foot and walks into the room, surveying the different journals that Kent has been looking into. “Do you want help?” she finally asks, purposefully casual, uncaring. One of her hands lingers on the doorknob, ready to shut it behind her if he asks her to go.

Glaring, Kent points to the books. “No, I don’t want help. I’m trying to figure out what’s going to happen so maybe it won’t be as bad.”

She returns the glare and offers up a shrug, scowling. “You’re not going to find anything. As many generations as the curse has gone through, do you think it’s run out of options? Do you think the gods will pick from a multiple choice list and go from there? You won’t be able to figure it out, so you can either sit around here sulking all day, or you can come outside and help Viv and I build a sandcastle.”

With that, she leaves, not bothering to shut the door behind her.

Kent emerges from the house fifteen minutes later, lathered in sunscreen. “You didn’t build the moat right,” he points out, and that’s all he says before sitting down next to them in the sand, dutifully scooping out buckets to make a proper moat.

-x-

August runs on, sticky as it drips through the air, and the iron in his blood corrodes, chipping away at his veins with each passing day. It does not get better, it only gets worse. Aunt Helena leaves with Vivian and Victoria, back to recital practice for Victoria and back to Columbia for Vivian, back to the house for Aunt Helena, back to Miriam and Eliza and Lucinda as they bleed from the mouths for information that’s been kept from him.

Kent and Angelica stay, get the beach house prepared to re-assume its empty state for after they are gone. They carry the wooden boats back to shore to dry, store them in the shed before night comes and dew falls on them. 

The last boat lingers on the dock, bounced by the waves unrepentant as it knocks into its safe haven, raging at the injustice of having to stay still. Kent lifts the rope carefully, squeezing saltwater from it as he pulls the boat in against the current. It is hard work, makes his bones ache as he remembers that workouts can happen away from the gym and the ice.

The southern sun, in all of its sweltering glory, does not seem to care that he’ll be gone in a few days. It does not care about Kent and his sunburns and his chapped lips, does not care that a cursed boy has made home under it for the last few months. North Carolina in August is worse than it was in July, and Kent thinks fondly of Rimouski.

He wants to sleep under blankets of snow, pressing down on him even as he wakes up, gasping for air and finds only ice. He dreams of ice, of hockey rinks waiting for skate tracks to be made, of shards that hang threateningly from the roof’s edge. Rarely, he dreams of the snow outside his billet house, a makeshift home for these runaway years.

Rarer, still, are dreams of Jack.

Jack, hair hanging in his face because he hates getting it cut. Jack, lounged next to him on the bus as they go on roadies, drooling on his shoulder. Jack, eyes blazing after making the winning goal.

Jack, Jack, Jack.

Rimouski will only provide some relief. In its own way, the beach house has become a safe haven, has hidden him from the curse for as long as it was able. He will have to return to his life, no matter the ongoing summer. This reprieve can only last for so long.

-x-

Though North Carolina was beginning to be stifling, New York is hardly a relief. He’ll pack for a day and then head back to Rimouski, and then he’ll wait. There’s not a whole lot left to be done, but the waiting is exhausting. And no matter how many ways Angelica tries to approach the subject, he’s not going to just stay home until fall. He’s on a team, he needs to go back up for practice and preseason.

The lure, aside from his duty as a member of the team, is Jack. Kent knows it’s bad, how he’s willing to risk everything like this, but something savage in him breaks at the idea of being apart longer. In him, the tiniest hope is breaking free, with only just over a month left: What if the curse doesn’t apply to him? What if he’s immune, and it never strikes? It is so tempting to believe in it that he doesn’t tell anyone of his suspicions, how he lays awake at night thinking about how much time he’s wasted, believing in the curse. Believing that it could interfere in his life this way, as though it has any power over him.

Kent is hopeful, but he’s not stupid – he knows not to say it out loud, not to dare tempt the gods lest they have decided to give him mercy, only to steal it away.

To have his future, free of the curse. It is a dream, something he has not dared to think of since he was little, before he truly understood how his life was meant to happen. It is filled with unspeakable possibilities, joys so large that Kent cannot imagine their magnitude. Visions of the NHL draft, of years spent playing against Jack during the season and practicing with him in the summer. Finally, his cousins won’t have to put up barriers between themselves and him in fear of the curse interacting with the family as a whole.

Freedom is so close, only a little over a month away. Kent packs his bags, keeps his mouth shut, and goes back to Rimouski, hoping against everything that he’ll be able to make it through.

-x-

The cold of Rimouski isn’t actually that cold, and Kent thinks about the cold winter and the spring taking forever to actually thaw the ice. He’ll take anything, any excuse to prove to him that summer is coming to an end. He comforts himself with _Game of Thrones_ references. Winter is coming, winter is coming, and soon enough the snow will fall. It soothes him, reluctant as he is, knowing that this summer cannot truly be endless.

It’s only when he actually gets to the rink that the restless feeling inside his skin settles, calm with the promise of true exertion once again. The team is excited, the same way they were at the beginning of last season, and now Kent isn’t worried about coming across as overactive or too enthusiastic, he just shoves his skates on and pushes off onto the ice.

The only way that Kent can think of to describe it is like coming home. “Jesus,” he whispers under his breath, stretching his limbs casually as he looks around and spies Jack at the other end of the ice, taking shots on goal.

All at once, everything comes together. The summer has not ended, the curse is still a possibility, still a likelihood at this point. Up until this point, the curse hasn’t failed yet, and Kent can’t think of anything that would separate him from the line he’s come from. He needs to focus, to zone in, because otherwise he’ll do something stupid like call attention to the fact that the gods haven’t actually followed through on their punishment for him yet. Kent knows better than to tempt fate.

Skating over to Jack, Kent takes advantage of the fact that he hasn’t been spotted yet. He snags a puck that’s bounced back from the net, skating quietly around and then steadies himself while he takes aim.

It needs to be the right moment, the perfect moment, and Kent waits patiently until Jack takes a step and then – perfect.

Kent’s puck sails through the air, between Jack’s legs, and sinks beautifully into the net, knocking into the puck that Jack sent in.

“Crisse,” Jack cries in surprise, turning around and then his face lights up, and Kent was absolutely wrong in that he waited until the perfect moment to take the shot. That was a good moment, and this is the perfect moment, with Jack smiling at him, their pucks in the net, a preview of the years that will come to them.

“Hey, Zimms,” Kent says, trying for nonchalant and probably coming across as completely obvious, but that’s okay, too. He leans on his stick and offers up a grin, honest and true. “Didja miss me?”

-x-

The first day of fall comes on a Monday, and Kent spends the weekend locked in his billet room, praying. The gods can give him this, they have the power to keep the curse from touching him. The summer is nearly over, and it scares Kent so much to know that he’s growing hopeful. Prideful, as Miriam would tell him.

His aunts call, try to talk to him about old magic and the lasting power of curses, trying to keep their heads, but Kent hears the excitement bubbling just under their voices. He’s not the only one praying that he escapes the summer unscathed, and his mother whispers once that perhaps the gods have grown merciful, have seen how harmful the curse can be. The seventeenth summer is nearly over, and the only pain Kent has to show from it are the spots where his sunburns are still peeling.

Taunting him is the promise that he made to himself before the summer began. Jack is forbidden, until after the seventeenth summer. It has been a long wait, but Kent will take his happiness when he knows that he’s safe and not a moment before.

He’ll take his happiness when he knows that Jack’s safe. Until then, it is too much to risk.

On Sunday night, he calls Jack, pacing across his room. It could be a bad idea, a very bad idea, but Kent can’t let it go, can’t think about what could happen if he’s waited too long. He’s waited long enough as it is, and Kent has always preferred instant gratification to waiting it out.

“Hey, Kent,” Jack says, sounding a little tired. Kent’s eyes jump to his alarm clock, 11:22 pm.

“Did I wake you?” he asks, trying to be polite and mostly hoping that Jack won’t actually want to go back to sleep.

“No, but I was just about to go to bed,” Jack answers. “What’s up?” His voice gets an edge to it, worried about why his best friend is calling him at this time. “Are you okay?”

Shit, too much worry. “I’m fine, I’m great, actually. I was just wondering if you wanted to hang out tonight,” Kent says, forcing the words out as he watches the clock move forward a minute. If Jack says no, he can wait until before school or something, that would work, too. Even so, he bites his lip, waiting and trying to convince himself that it’s not the end of the world if Jack says no. It’d be reasonable, even, considering that Kent’s calling him at eleven at night on a Sunday.

Jack pauses, and Kent steels himself for the disappointment that’s to come, and then Jack says, “I mean, sure, if you want to hang out at midnight on a Sunday. My place or yours?”

Oh, God. Kent fist pumps the air and rolls his shoulders back as he tries to play it cool. “I was thinking of driving over to yours, actually. Would that be good?”

“Uh, yeah. Text me when you’re here so you don’t wake up the Martins,” Jack says, sounding more awake by the moment.

Right, Jack’s billet family. “Yeah, okay,” Kent agrees easily, his stomach in knots. “I’ve got to do something before I leave, so I’ll probably get there at midnight. I’ll see you then!”

-x-

He waits until five minutes til midnight before starting on the ten minute drive to Jack’s billet home. Five minutes until summer is officially over, and Kent feels bad for ignoring his family’s calls when they must be worried out of their minds in these final minutes, but it’s just something that he’s got to do for himself. He made a promise, and the first day of fall is almost upon them, and Kent isn’t going to lose any more time than he has to.

At Jack’s house, he sends a text and watches with rapt attention as the light in Jack’s bedroom flicks on. Tracking Jack’s movements through the house, Kent gets out of the car and holds his breath until he hears the lock on the front door flip open, Jack’s face peering between the crack and finally noticing Kent standing over by his car.

“Why are we hanging out at this time? I thought you were busy this weekend,” Jack says, holding the door for Kent and locking it again once he’s inside.

That was the excuse that Kent gave for wanting to be alone for the last few days. He was afraid the temptation might be too much, that he might cave beforehand and the gods wouldn’t be able to resist punishing him in the kind of way that would last longer than a single summer. He shrugs, grinning a little as they make their way down the hallway. His heart feels like it’s about to jump out of his chest.

Breathing slowly, Kent says softly, “I always have time for you.”

Jack’s eyes jump to his, surprised and pleased, and as they come into Jack’s bedroom there’s a pause between the two of them, something that stretches wide and far even as Kent leans across the space, rising slightly onto his toes to press his mouth against Jack’s.

A beat, maybe two, and then Jack leans down so that Kent doesn’t have to lift himself up any longer, and the entire summer of anticipation that led to nothing was worth if this is what he gets from it. God, it’s so worth it. The dry press of lips against his own is worth everything – he’ll take a thousand summers like that if he gets to have Jack like this.

Pulling back, Jack stares at Kent, serious and a little wide-eyed, almost stunned like he is for the split second after he’s shot a puck into the goal, almost unwilling to believe that it’s really happening. “It took you long enough,” he finally says, shutting his bedroom door behind them.

“In my defense, I’ve been there, I was just… Waiting,” Kent tries, unable to stop the grin that grows over his features. It’s a poor excuse, considering that he can’t tell Jack about the curse. He doesn’t have to tell Jack about the curse – he’ll never have to. It doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t have a hold over him, either works. He never has to spend months waiting for summer to be over again.

Soft, Jack pulls Kent closer to him, his lips pulling up in a smile. “I glad you didn’t wait too long.”

There has been enough waiting for them. Any longer would be too much, and Kent exhales slowly as he tries to keep himself grounded. There are so many things that he is thankful for, but right now all that he can begin to think about is Jack, in front of him, smiling, unconcerned with everything else in the world.

Kent leans back in, anchoring himself to Jack, letting his head spin when Jack presses his hands tight into Kent’s sides, grounding him and making this real, God, it’s finally real. Kent made good on his promise, and the gods have spared him a curse that he had nothing to do with. There are so many good things that he has to be thankful for. “I am the luckiest guy on the planet,” Kent breathes, and he feels like he might as well be floating.

Jack’s eyes crinkle at him, amused, and Kent pushes forward to find out what laughter tastes like through someone else’s mouth.

-x-

The Parsons, as a whole, don’t understand how the curse could have overlooked Kent. Angelica is too thankful to be concerned with the binding promises of old magic, too grateful that the gods have spared her son this danger, have given him some reprieve for the life that he had been condemned with. Helena is grateful but critical of this outcome, unused to Parsons coming through unscathed.

It’s a lot, that’s all.

“There’s nothing to be done, that’s the thing. We just need to be thankful that Kent has gotten through this,” Angelica tells her mother, grinding the cinnamon sticks down to a fine powder.

Miriam does not so much as blink. “What of his thirty-fourth summer? Will the gods spare him twice?” she asks, keeping an eye on the flickering candle in front of her. She holds a mint leaf over the flame, careful, watchful of the smoke that rises skyward. So it would seem that Kent has really has managed to escape the curse thus far.

It is not a question that Angelica would like to dwell. “That’s seventeen summers away, Mother. Can’t you be appreciative before going ahead and worrying about that?” she asks, accidentally angling the blade in the wrong direction. It cuts into the tip of her finger, coming away to show a droplet of red blood marring her pale skin. Angelica lifts the wounded appendage to her mouth, sucking away the blood gently.

“I can worry about what I see fit, thank you,” Miriam says, waving away whatever words Angelica has for her.

“Even Eliza is happy,” Angelica responds bitterly.

Her tone strikes a nerve with Miriam, who whirls around angrily, moving the smoke of the mint around her. “Do you think I am not happy? Do you think I have not prayed to the gods for them to spare him when he has done nothing wrong? My own grandchild, doomed by his own blood, the curse that you passed on knowingly. I am thrilled to know that he is not in danger for the time being.” Seething, she rests her hands on the stone counter.

“The fact remains that there are more summers to be lived, and I may not be here for the next one. Throw in the fact that I am worried for my own daughter, and of course I’m distressed.” Her gray eyes flash, stormy for a moment, flat and metallic the next.

Angelica hesitates, pulling her shoulders back. “What reason to do you have to be worried about me?” she asks in a clipped tone.

Arching an eyebrow, Miriam turns back to the candle. “You invoked the curse, knowing the consequences. And still you refused to listen to reason, choosing to give that boy to the world while aware of how it might treat him. The gods have been merciful to your son, knowing that he did not bring this upon himself. Do you think that they will be as kind to you?” she hisses.

It is a reality that Angelica has looked away from for too long, and she yanks away from the counter, slamming her injured hand on the surface, leaving a streak of blood on the stone as she stalks off.

-x-

With Jack, hockey is even better than before. Their on-ice chemistry sparks more and more often since they’ve started exploring their off-ice chemistry, and knowing where Jack is on the ice doesn’t even require Kent to look around anymore. He knows Jack well enough that he knows where Jack’s going to be next, and the coaches are thrilled as they play better and better.

“We’re winning it all this year,” Kent promises Jack, pressing the words into his lips with an undeniable smile that’s returned on Jack’s face. It’s undeniable at this point, with the way the team’s been playing. It’s coming together, everything is finally coming together.

“One Memorial Cup, coming up,” Jack announces, a laugh bubbling through his lips. His smiles are bashful instead of the wide, open things that Kent’s face gives so easily, but it will come easier to him soon. Already, it’s easier for him, to think about Juniors passing in a haze of waking up next to Kent in exhaustion from late practices followed by other activities.

Past Juniors, the future isn’t so clear. It would be easier, if the NHL season was over, if they knew what order the teams were picking. There’s so much left to chance, and not enough NHL teams are close to each other. It’s distinctly possible that he and Kent will end up on opposite sides of the country, doomed to only seeing each other once every few months, stealing nights together after playing against each other. His stomach churns at the prospect of that, not to mention that his original worries of playing professionally have not entirely been put to rest.

Right now, though, with Kent, things aren’t bad. They’re pretty great, actually, and Jack keeps that in mind as he puts his fears aside and fetches a bucket of pucks. They’ve got a few hours alone at the rink before their coaches and the rest of the team shows up. “I was thinking we could run some drills,” Jack says, grabbing his stick and nodding to where Kent’s is standing in his own locker.

Kent rolls his eyes, nevertheless grabbing his stick and following Jack out onto the ice. “I swear, Zimms, you must be the only guy on the planet who insists on practicing hockey when you’ve got a few hours alone with your boyfriend.”

Jack turns around to face Kent and slams into a wall on the rink. Reaching out and steadying himself, Jack balances on his skates and stares blankly at Kent, who’s watching him, amused.

“Boyfriend?” Jack asks, gaping a little bit in surprise.

Straightening up, Kent shrugs defensively and looks over to the goal. “I mean, whatever. It was the first word that I thought of, doesn’t mean that it has to stick,” he mumbles, his brows drawing together as he shrugs once more. His jaw sets, tension obvious through that and how he holds his shoulders.

Having gotten over his moment of surprise, Jack skates quickly over, going so far as to spin around Kent in a circle. For the first time, his thinks that his smile is wider than Kent’s. “Shut the fuck up, of course you’re my boyfriend,” he states, pushing over and taking in Kent’s startled expression before leaning down the slightest of degrees to meet Kent’s lips in a kiss that feels more like victory that anything else.

“I mean, whatever,” Kent reiterates, looking stupider for every moment that his smile grows on his lips. “I guess, if you want to be.”

Yes, yes, Jack wants to be. Of course he wants to be. Kent’s body is pressed between the boards and Jack’s chest, and the NHL is a distant blip on the map as Jack presses his lips to Kent’s temple and whispers, “Come to Montreal and spend Thanksgiving with my family.”

Kent gives him a grin that’s positively shit eating. “Only if you come to New York for the real Thanksgiving,” he bargains, like Jack is going to give up an opportunity like that and tell him no.

It feels like a promise, like it carries more weight than it should when Jack nods and agrees before kissing Kent for real.

-x-

They carve out time for themselves, between school and homework and hockey, always hockey. It is hard work, but no harder than growing up with the weight of a curse on his shoulders, Kent reflects. He’ll take Jack instead of a curse, though, any day. The rewards are much sweeter than a summer filled with hot sun and quiet longing, no matter how quiet they have to keep it around their teammates.

It’s not that they’re afraid of them not being okay with it. It’s just, in a sport where a homophobic slur is one of the worst things you can call someone, Kent doesn’t exactly trust that the team would be thrilled with their captain and alternate being in a relationship with each other. There’s not an out player in the entire league, and Kent’s dreams of his rookie year don’t include giving interviews to reporters prying about his sexuality.

So, this way, it’s a kind of practice, keeping it a secret now as a prelude to keeping it a secret later. There are rumors, of course, because that’s what happens when they’re on the same team and closer than people know otherwise how to explain. The good thing is that they’re just rumors, and no one thinks there’s much to them.

“It’s going to get worse,” Jack informs him, sitting quietly on the edge of Kent’s bed as the shorter boy packs for the winter break. “I mean, in the spring, the interviews are going to be more often, and the reporters will want quotes, real quotes. Not just the sound bites that the coaches have given us.”

“We’ve got a great group of guys on the team, and everyone is important,” Kent parrots, fishing socks out of his drawers.

Jack rolls his eyes and lies back on the bed, resting his head on his arms. “I mean it, you know. They’re not going to let go after that kind of stuff. A lot of it isn’t even going to be about the team, it’ll be about how you feel about going pro–”

“Fucking awesome,” Kent interjects.

“–Not to mention where you feel your placement in the draft is going to fall. You’ll have to talk about the lottery and where you’d like to go, not to mention how you might feel about being placed in AHL before getting boosted to NHL.” Jack sighs, his aborted draft attempt from the year before clearly on his mind. It doesn’t escape Kent’s notice that Jack is repeating his father’s words.

Balling up his socks and tossing them in the duffel on the floor, Kent crawls on the bed as well, lying across Jack and flicking him in the nose.

Jack cracks an eye open and stares at Kent humorlessly. “You rang?”

“First of all, the first and second draft picks don’t go into the AHL. They have to carry their franchise back to the top,” Kent says with an eye roll. “And second of all, it doesn’t matter where I go, or where you go. We’ll play our first few seasons and do our time, and then we’ll manage to get traded to the same team. You know hockey can only go so long without Parse and Zimms no look one timers,” he persuades him, pressing him lips against Jack’s collarbone and resting his teeth on top of the skin with the barest of pressure.

The intake of breath from Jack doesn’t surprise Kent, fighting against snickering with the predictability of it all. “Until then, we’ve got All Star games,” Jack acquiesces finally. 

“Not to mention the Olympics, if you’re willing to cash in your mom’s side of the citizenship,” Kent says, arching an eyebrow as he waits for Jack to consider it.

Wrinkling his nose, Jack shakes his head and gives a laugh. “You can’t talk me into leaving Canada that easily, you know. It’s going to take a lot more than that,” he protests, smiling slightly when Kent crawls just a little further up his chest.

“Whatever. I’ve got time,” Kent says, disregarding it as he traces his tongue along Jack’s jawline before taking Jack’s earlobe into his mouth and sucking hard.

With that, Jack props himself up by his elbows and brings his Kent’s mouth up to his own, because that’s easier than continuing the conversation. Kent means well, he knows he must, but sometimes it’s too much.

Kent’s hands scramble to the hem of Jack’s shirt, fingers scratching gently at his hips as he makes encouraging noises in the back of his throat. Sitting up fully, Jack reaches back and throws the offending article of clothing off the bed, joined a moment later by Kent’s own. “God, I can’t believe you’re real,” Kent whispers, almost reverently, sliding his hands alone Jack’s side.

“Stop that,” Jack manages, choking on a laugh. His nose wrinkled, he twitches in Kent’s grasp.

“You’re so ticklish,” Kent says in delight, taking a few more seconds to watch Jack try helplessly to fight him off.

Landing a solid kick to Kent’s stomach, Jack finally pulls away, breathless as his laughter slows. “Fuck off, like you’re one to talk. As if your feet aren’t ticklish,” he jabs, reaching down the bad for one of Kent’s feet, dodging when it comes at him.

Kent rolls over beside Jack so that he’s not on top of him anymore, his lips twisted in a smile. “You’re the worst,” he says fondly, diving in for a kiss.

With a sigh, Jack moves over to him, pulling himself on top of Kent to reverse their positions. “I’m your favorite,” he taunts, laughter growing in his chest and stretching like a vine through his throat. “You think I’m the best, you dream about me,” he preens, nuzzling Kent’s cheek against his own, where he can feel Kent’s smile forming against his will.

“I think you’re the worst,” Kent grumbles, and even though he’s a bad liar at the best of times, he’s not even trying to hide it now.

Jack’s chest swells, and he kisses his boyfriend – his boyfriend, that’s such a novel thing still, he’s never going to be over the fact that he gets to look at Kent and think _that’s my boyfriend_. “You think I’m the best,” he corrects, adjusting himself with his elbows and resting more of his weight on Kent, who rolls his eyes in protest. “That’s why I’m going to New York for the start of break, and why you’re coming to Montreal for New Years, right? Because you want to spend time with me, and you want to hang out with me. You want to be my New Year’s kiss.”

“I’m just worried about all of those hockey legends trying to set you up with their daughters. Your kids will be hockey legacies already, you don’t need to double it up. I hear inbreeding can have some pretty detrimental effects.” Huffing, Kent leans up so their noses are almost touching.

Startled, Jack tips his head back and lets out a laugh. “I’m trying to seduce you here, and you’re talking about inbreeding,” he manages between giggles. “Oh, God, you’re the absolute worst.”

Kent’s eyebrows shoot up, and he instinctively wraps his arms around the taller boy to keep him in place. “Well, I didn’t realize you were trying seduce me. Looks like you were doing a pretty shit job at it,” he starts, though he snickers a little at the thought. “Okay, okay, in that case, yeah, fine. I want to be your midnight kiss. I want to be the only one you kiss,” he says, growing more confident with every word.

Sinking into Kent’s touch, Jack tilts his head, pressing his lips to Kent’s throat in acknowledgement. “You’re only one I kiss,” he whispers, closing his eyes at the feeling of Kent’s hands settling gently at his hips. “You’re only one I ever want to kiss.”

-x-

Pulling up outside the Victorian house that Kent called home for the first sixteen years of life, Jack lets out a low whistle. “So you thought you wouldn’t mention that you grew up in a veritable mansion?” he asks sardonically, putting on the emergency brake before turning the engine off.

“It’s not a…” Kent starts, inspecting the house critically, and then shrugging. “Okay, yeah, but there were twelve of us living here at one time, so we pretty much used all the space. And we’re all home for Christmas, so I hope you’re ready for this.” He climbs out of the car and opens the truck, keeping an eye on the empty front porch.

“Okay, go through them all one more time. I really don’t want to mess this up,” Jack pleads, a little whiny, and Kent has half a mind to not tell him, let Jack figure it out over the week. “I know your aunt’s names, but it’s your cousins I’m worried about getting mixed up.”

Hefting out their bags, Kent runs through the list again. “Okay, so the oldest is Vivian–”

“Aunt Helena’s daughter, going to Julliard and majoring in Voice, will be spending the summer in Italy singing for the Rome Opera. She’ll be coming on Sunday,” Jack recites, brow furrowed in concentration.

“Olivia.”

“Eliza’s daughter, only child, attending Julliard as well and majoring in Collaborative Piano. She’s played for all of Vivian’s showcases, and she’ll also be coming in Sunday.”

“Good, good. Then, Victoria–”

“Helena’s other daughter, also plays piano, my age, and she’s going to NYU, majoring in undecided engineering.”

It’s clear that Jack has this down already, but Kent goes on, checking to make sure that they’ve got everything. “Taylor.”

“Lucinda’s daughter, senior this year, looking into Columbia to major in Political Science. Her backup plan is University of Rochester. Plays soccer as a defenseman.”

“In soccer they’re called defenders, but whatever, she actually plays goalie. Daphne.”

“Lucinda’s daughter, three years younger than you, so I guess she’s in her freshman year.”

“And that leaves Amanda.”

Jack pauses, biting his lip for a moment. “Lucinda’s daughter. Really wants a puppy.”

God help him, but it’s a good thing that the curse doesn’t affect him, because Kent doesn’t know how he ever kept his distance from Jack. Jack has memorized his cousins’ interest and ages in an effort to make Kent’s family like him, as though they could keep from loving him as much as Kent does. Not that they’ve talked about it, but it’s true, and Kent figures they’ll get around to saying it soon enough. Three months might be a little too early.

“You got them all,” Kent manages, squinting towards the house as Jack shuts the trunk and the curtains of the living room bristle slightly. “I’m pretty sure they’re watching us.” Probably Amanda and Daphne, although he wouldn’t put it past Victoria or Taylor.

Jack ducks his head, tucking into Kent’s shoulder so that they won’t be able to see his face. “So, I guess we go in now? Or do we wait for them to come down here?”

Equally good options, but Jack hasn’t named the best one yet. “Wanna give them a show?” Kent questions, curiosity making him pose it and propriety stopping him from just going for it before getting the go ahead from Jack. After all, Kent’s family already has a pretty well formed opinion of Kent, a little making out in the driveway isn’t going to change much of that. Jack, on the other hand, hasn’t spent sixteen years annoying and being annoyed by them. He isn’t quite sure what he’s agreed to, spending a week here before heading back to Montreal and waiting for Kent to join him for the New Year.

A small, deeply inelegant snort passes through Jack’s nose, and Kent twitches at the sensation. “Is it just your cousins?” he checks, getting a sly look in his eyes that at least indicates that he’s tempted by the offer.

Probably. His aunts aren’t really out to embarrass him when they have so many other kids to take that urge out on. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” Kent says, unconsciously lowering his voice to a whisper. If Jack’s tempted, Kent’s not about to take it back. Besides, he likes the look of Jack here, in New York, for him. It’s the kind of thing that should be acknowledged, appreciated.

Jack pulls away and grins, slow and predatory, the kind of thing that he knows Kent likes. “Well, if they’re waiting for a show, we should at least try to give them one,” he agrees, waiting for Kent to turn around before kissing him. It’s not a particularly long or deep kiss, no tongue and their mouths don’t open wide enough to permit that, but the touch of lips in front of Kent’s family is a declaration of sorts. A way to prove that Jack has come all this way for a reason.

“Better keep it PG, guys. Don’t want to ruin the younger ones’ innocence,” a voice says behind them, and Jack startles and stills while Kent turns around to go running straight at a blonde woman who is nearly as tall as he is.

“Viv, I thought you’d be gone until Sunday,” Kent says, grinning wide and open as he feels Jack step up behind him.

Brushing a lock of hair back, she shrugs. “I had to move around some lessons, but it worked out. I figured I’d better come home so I could be properly introduced to the boyfriend. I see he’s gotten comfortable.” She cocks her head and looks away from Kent, narrowing her eyes ever so slightly at Jack as she extends her hand. “Vivian Parson.”

“Jack Zimmermann. Good to see you again,” Jack says, nearly tripping over himself to get the words out.

With a distant sort of feeling, Kent realizes that Vivian is posturing in front of Jack. Oh, Christ. “Viv, super good to see you. We were about to head inside, actually, we can meet you in there?” Kent asks, giving her his sunniest smile as he glares at her. She purses her lips, and for a moment he thinks that she’ll say she’ll walk in with them or something ridiculous, and then she nods and heads back up the steps and into the house.

The curtains rustle as the rest of the Parson cousins back away from their hiding spots before Vivian catches them.

When Kent turns around, Jack is pale and keeps his shoulders ramrods straight. “Are they all going to be like that?” he manages, already winded.

Kent would normally feel bad, and he does, a little bit. He’d like for Jack to be as at ease as possible, but that’s not going to be possible, quite frankly. Besides, he hasn’t been feeling very charitable since Jack mentioned the guest list of the Zimmermann New Year’s Eve party. “I have to meet Wayne Gretsky in like two weeks, okay? You can get through eleven girls.”

-x-

Kent is loading his bag into the car when he gets the call. Slamming the door, he reaches into his pocket and pulls his phone out, noticing how Jack’s contact picture appears on the screen, something from playoffs last year with his hair plastered to his face from helmet sweat. “Hey, Zimms, I’m about to take off,” he says, checking to make sure that he has enough CDs to last through the drive.

“There’s a problem,” Jack says, not bothering to beat around the bush.

Automatically standing straighter, Kent looks around quickly to make sure that none of his cousins are around. “What happened? Have you been hurt? You’re still taking your meds, right?” he demands, listing off the possible problems that immediately come to mind. There are other possibilities of course, but these are the most pressing and are the ones he thinks of first.

A pause, like Jack hadn’t considered some of these options. Like Kent wouldn’t immediately jump to the worst conclusion and work his way back from there. “Nothing like that, I’m fine. And, um, I am taking my meds. I didn’t know you were worried about that,” Jack says carefully.

Didn’t know he was worried about… “Of course I worry about that stuff, you idiot,” Kent replies, a tad incredulous that Jack didn’t think that his boyfriend would be worried about his mental illness. That’s not the most important matter at hand, though, so Kent pushes the thought aside as he asks, “What’s the problem, then?”

Jack hisses out a short breath and finally answers, voice low like he’s desperately trying to keep others from overhearing, “My mom found the condoms that I bought.” He waits a moment, for Kent to realize the significance of this.

Narrowing his eyes, Kent glances up to the window of his room, where a box of condoms is stored in his nightstand, given to him by a pink-faced Lucinda who hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but had informed him that the Internet had a wealth of knowledge about protection for gay men. Certainly not the highlight of their interactions, and mortifying in its own way, but Kent didn’t deem it as a problem and certainly didn’t call Jack to tell him as such right after it happened. “Okay, yeah, so,” he acknowledges, clearly ready for Jack to get to the problem.

“So? All you have to say about it is ‘so’?” Jack demands, and if Kent knows him at all, he’s probably pacing around whatever space he’s in. Maybe locked in his room for privacy, since he obviously considers this conversation such a big deal. “Kent, my mom found _condoms_.”

Yeah, Kent’s hearing works fine. He knows. “So? I told you about Lucinda giving me condoms the first day that you visited.” Assured that it’s not as dramatic a topic as he might have expected, he locks the car and walks up the porch, holding the phone to his cheek with his shoulder as he works at unsticking the front door to open it.

With a huff, Jack murmurs a few choice words in French that Kent can’t make out, but would probably have him rolling his eyes. For good measure, Kent rolls his eyes anyway. “No, this is different. Because your family was all, ‘you have a boyfriend let’s make sure you’re safe about everything’ just for good measure. My mother was all ‘you have a boyfriend let’s meet him and make sure he’s a nice young man.’ And now she’s seen the condoms, so I’m pretty sure she’s convinced you’re _not_ a nice young man.” He exhales noisily, as though Kent is being especially thick for not understanding yet.

Despite the fact that his aunts clearly wouldn’t care, Kent still considers his younger cousins impressionable enough to not talk about sex near them. That and the fact that his older cousins would chirp him for the rest of his life about it helps to motivate him to take the phone back into his room. “One second,” he says to Jack, walking quickly through the house.

“Fine,” Jack agrees, obviously annoyed by how long Kent is taking to see where he’s coming from.

After making it to his room, Kent closes the door behind him and leaps onto the bed. He crosses his legs and maneuvers himself into a sitting position. “So you’re telling me,” he starts, hoping that Jack will jump in and correct him at any moment, “that your mom hates me because I’m having sex with her son?”

A moment of silence of Jack’s end, and then, “Well, yeah. Pretty much.”

Flopping back onto the bed, Kent heaves a sigh. “Well, fuck,” he says, succinct as ever.

Jack snickers lightly. “We’d better not,” he manages, before dissolving into full-fledged laughter because keeping quiet is too much. Kent scowls at the receiver and rolls his eyes before hanging up.

-x-

A day later, Kent pulls up the Zimmermann’s driveway after going through the gate (they have a gate – he feels like it’s something that Jack should have mentioned, an actual gate). He’s in the process of getting out and pulling his bag with him when a hand reaches in and pulls the bag out for him, turning around to show Jack grinning at him almost shyly.

“You made good time,” Jack greets him, ducking slightly to get in a quick kiss to Kent’s cheek.

“I may take speed limits as more of a suggestion,” Kent allows, tempted to lean up to get a better kiss than that. He stays back, though, glancing over to the front door to see Alicia Zimmermann making her way down the steps. Thankful that he didn’t, he stays with his feet touching the ground surely.

It’s not the first time that he’s met Jack’s parents. It’s not even the first time that he’s met Jack’s parents as Jack’s boyfriend, so Kent tries to assure himself that there’s no reason to be worried. Alicia likes him, thinks that he helps Jack not be so serious all the time. A nagging voice at the back of his mind pops up and reminds him that they didn’t exactly have this kind of problem then. So he’s a little worried.

“Hi, Mrs. Zimmermann!” he yells, ducking around Jack and waving at her as she walks over to them.

Just like the other times he’s met her, she greets him with a kiss on the cheek and smiles beatifically at him. For a moment, Kent is sure that Jack must have freaked out over nothing. It’s the same way it’s always been, no apprehension whatsoever. “Kent, it’s good to see you. Thank you for returning our son to us, all he’s talked about the past week is going back to New York.” She glances up to where Jack stands beside them, blushing slightly as he avoids eye contact.

“Well, we tried to keep him entertained for a while, but I figured it was best to send him back to you guys,” Kent says, relaxing as he ignores Jack’s widened eyes and the way that he tries to lodge his elbow into Kent’s rib cage.

It’s totally normal. Jack probably overreacted or maybe Alicia used to be freaked out and has now gotten over it. Once they get into the house, Kent is going to chirp Jack to infinity for thinking that this could have mattered. The Zimmermanns love him, they’re probably pumped that Jack landed a great boyfriend who understands why hockey has an equal priority with their relationship.

Alicia nods vaguely at him, eyes narrowing as she turns away. “Well, yes. Speaking of entertainment. I thought I’d let you know that we’re remodeling some of the guest bedrooms, so the one you stayed in previously is unavailable.” She waves a hand at the house, probably gesturing to the unusable rooms. “Jack, you can take Kent’s bag to the guest room across the hall from your father and I,” she says magnanimously.

Freezing, Kent turns an almost imperceptible amount until he’s making eye contact with Jack. Across the hall. There is no other way to interpret that sentence. Kent does not, absolutely does not, overreact. It’s just, he’d kind of been planning to stay in the guest room next to Jack’s, and by that he meant he’d keep his stuff there and sleep in Jack’s room, same as over Thanksgiving.

“Sure,” Jack agrees, voice strained, eyes bulging a little.

Across the hall from the Zimmermann’s bedroom renders that plan pointless. Oh, God, now all Kent can think about is Bad Bob Zimmermann glaring at him if he were to try to sneak over to Jack’s room on the other side of the house. “Sounds great,” Kent throws in, but the words don’t even sound true to him.

Alicia grins, blue eyes sparkling as she starts back up the steps. “Excellent. Bob is on business now, he should be here in the morning,” she explains, leaving them standing by Kent’s car, jaws slack.

“Jesus,” Kent hisses, rubbing his temple absentmindedly.

“I… Fuck,” Jack elaborates, succinct as ever.

Giving a mirthless laugh, Kent looks up at the sky and takes his sunglasses off. “Well, let’s go,” he allows finally, forcefully smoothing his features out and clasping his hand in Jack’s before taking a step forward.

-x-

“Do you need anything? Can I get you something?” Kent asks, tentatively reaching out and running his fingers through Jack’s hair.

Jack reaches out to grab his hand, and for a moment Kent is sure he’s going to push him away. When Jack’s anxiety gets like this, where everything is pressing in on him, space can help, which means he doesn’t always like to be touched. Kent pulls his hand away slightly in preparation for Jack to isolate himself, but Jack clutches it like a lifeline and tugs him closer.

Relieved, Kent goes easily, laying down on the space that Jack’s left for him on the bed in his billet family’s house. Being allowed to touch Jack during these is a blessing, because the ones he goes through alone are always so much worse. Or maybe it just feels that way to Kent, having to watch him without giving some sort of comfort. “How can I help?” he asks, knowing that there’s a good chance that he can’t.

Unresponsive at first, Jack shifts on the mattress until their bodies are lined up. “Just… Just stay here,” he answers finally, untangling their fingers but curling his hand around Kent’s wrist all the same. “Can you pull up the blanket?”

That’s right, the pressure can help. Kent nods and uses his free hand to reach to the other end of the bed and pull Jack’s down comforter over them both. “Do you want the spare blanket, too?” he asks, thinking about the quilt stored in the closet. He’d have to get out of the bed to go get it, and he really doesn’t want to leave Jack, even for a few moments, but he’d get it if Jack needed it.

Jack shakes his head minutely, tightening his hold on Kent’s wrist slightly as he makes sure the other boy doesn’t leave.

“I’m not going anywhere, Zimms,” Kent says, watching carefully how Jack nods and curls in on himself, slightly. He can’t imagine just leaving Jack to himself. These kinds of things can last for hours, and the idea of Jack dealing with that alone is almost incomprehensible. It doesn’t even matter that he can’t help that much, but he tries to reassure himself that he’s at least doing something, Jack did ask him to stay, after all, and Jack wouldn’t have done that if it wouldn’t have helped.

Kent cautiously curls himself around Jack, checking constantly to see if Jack is bothered by this development. Jack leans into the touch, though, thumb stroking the back of Kent’s wrist gratefully, so Kent wraps himself around his boyfriend and tries to keep himself from asking anymore questions.

Jack had been like this when he’d come in, and Kent knows better than to ask what caused it. Sometimes Jack doesn’t know, and even when he does, talking about it can make it worse. Especially when Kent asks and it’s bad enough to make him nonverbal. Kent sends up a quick prayer to the gods, a thank you that this one isn’t a non-verbal one, that Jack wants him to stay.

Distantly, he thinks of the summer, which seems so far off. The summer he’d spent at the beach, the summer that trudged through marshy waters and finally delivered him to freedom, to Jack. It ended in September, seven months ago. He remembers talking with Jack, the fear of the curse stretching through him.

He remembers asking Jack to tell him a story, something from Montreal where he’d hurt himself on his bike. It was dumb, something stupid that shouldn’t have made Kent calmer but did, inexplicably.

“Do you want me to tell you a story?” Kent asks, keeping his voice low. It’s warm, underneath the blanket, and it’s growing late. At this point he’ll probably just stay the night at Jack’s.

Cracking an eye open, Jack gives a humorless chuckle. “Sure,” he agrees after a moment.

Kent pauses and adjusts so that he’s not putting so much weight on his shoulder. He hums, thinking over what to tell Jack. They do everything at Rimouski together, so those are out. Plus, most of their days are filled with hockey practice and then drives to and from the rink, trying to complete homework in what little spare time they have. Not exactly the stuff of legends, so Kent digs back further, trying to find something that might help Jack calm down.

Swallowing, he moves slightly closer, exhaling as he tries to figure out where to begin. He’s heard it told so many times, his aunts repeating the tale again and again to him, a warning of what was to come. Still, he’s never told it himself. “Once upon a time,” he starts, encouraged when the corner of Jack’s mouth lifts up.

“Once upon a time, there was a queen,” Kent starts, forcing the words out one at a time, “and she was the most beautiful woman in the land. She was married to the most powerful king in the land, and they ruled over their kingdom together for many years. The king wasn’t always in the castle, because he was often away conquering lands to add to the kingdom.”

With a sigh, Jack pulls a pillow under his head. “So the queen was alone,” he says thoughtfully, sounding as though he’s remembering something.

Kent nods, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth to continue. “The queen was alone, often. And she was very beautiful, and very kind.” The kindness portion is an invention of his own, not included by his aunts or his mother when they told the story. But Kent thinks that she must have been kind, she must have been kind and beautiful to have captured so many hearts. “And when she was alone in the castle, she spent time with the sorcerer, who was a trusted advisor to the king. They would rule together in the king’s stead, helping the king’s subjects as best they could.”

“Were they good rulers?” Jack asks, shifting slightly into the space between them. He finally just lays down on his back, head on the mattress, facing Kent.

“They were. The queen wanted her subjects to be happy, and with her intelligence and diplomacy and the sorcerer’s magic, they created peace in the inner kingdom. The king was pleased by this, and when he returned for the queen’s birthday, he gave her a party that was to be the talk of the kingdom for many years to come.”

Reaching over, Kent rubs Jack’s back as the older boy sinks slightly into the mattress. He looks so peaceful. The meds must be kicking in, which usually takes longer than this, but Kent’s pretty sure Jack took more than he normally does. The panic was probably worse than usual.

“Lords and ladies from all over the kingdom came to honor the queen. A feast was given, with the hunters ensuring that only the best game be prepared for the meal. It was a celebration for all who intended, and the king bestowed many gifts upon his wife, including the finest jewels in all the land. She received those jewels, and fur coats, and new dresses of silks and velvets. It was everything that a lady could wish for and more,” Kent says, unable to stop himself from picturing the banquet, the tables laden with gifts for the queen as her husband sat beside her.

He decides to skip over the small anecdote about the jousting tournament, as it doesn’t affect the outcome, and Jack actually looks relaxed enough to the point where he might fall asleep. Time to get to the main point, really. “The king gave her everything, and at the end of the banquet, the sorcerer approached their table. He gifted the queen with a mirror, and when she wished it, the mirror would show her the land that she had left behind to be the queen. And the queen loved that mirror more than all of the king’s lavish presents combined. You see, in the king’s absence, the queen and the sorcerer had fallen in love.”

Jack lifts his chin slightly, twisting under the comforter. “He shouldn’t have left them for so long, he was their friend,” he mumbles, his words mostly swallowed by the pillow that he presses them into.

That’s one take on it. “He couldn’t have stayed and done his duties the way he was called to,” Kent explains, running his hand in a steady circular motion on Jack’s back. “He left them, and they fell in love, and the sorcerer knew that what the queen wanted more than anything was to return home when she was unable to leave the kingdom. That night, after the king had left the queen’s chambers, the sorcerer came to her and asked her to run away.”

This is where Kent starts to hate the story, because he knows what comes after. He remembers that summer in too much detail to forget how it affected his life. He keeps going, though, forcing himself to continue. “The queen agreed, because it was decided that they would run away to her homeland, which she missed dearly.”

“She was going to leave?” Jack asks, squinting as he thinks it over.

Relaxing into the feeling of Jack’s body next to his, Kent nods. “They packed to leave on the next full moon, before the king was to set off again, so that they wouldn’t leave the kingdom without a ruler. The night that they were to leave, though, the king was unable to sleep because the cicadas were too loud. He spotted them through his window, and he met them in the courtyard before they were able to get away without his notice.”

Helena’s voice echoes in his mind, after the dozens of times that she told him the story throughout his childhood. “The king was angry, and as the queen and the sorcerer tried to calm him. He tried to think of a suitable punishment, but he was unable to hear his own thoughts, for the cicadas were too loud, and he cursed them that their children would never truly know happiness. Every seventeenth summer, their sons would have a reason for screaming, and anyone who discovered their magic would be taken away from them,” Kent says, squeezing his eyes shut as his throat threatens to close.

“Why would that stop them from knowing happiness?” Jack asks drowsily, relaxing into Kent’s touch.

It’s a reasonable question, Kent supposes, for someone who didn’t grow up knowing the intricacies. “Think about it. If you fall in love with someone, you want them to know everything about you. And if they know that, they can’t stay. And even if you keep it from someone, you can only keep a secret for so long. Eventually, you slip up.”

Jack nods, groans as he reaches over and pulls Kent down next to him. “That sounds terrible. That was a sad story.”

For the first time in a long time, Kent can feel his own magic, barely there, crackling under the surface of his skin. It’s weak after more than a year of disuse, but it’s something that will never go fully away. Rolling over, he presses his face into Jack’s neck. “Yeah,” he acknowledges, slipping an arm around Jack’s waist.

“Does it have a happy ending?” Jack asks, barely awake at this point.

Kent thinks of the ongoing summer that finally came to an end, of the anticipation, of the drive to Jack’s billet house that fateful night, of their first kiss on the first day of fall. “Yeah,” he whispers, resting his hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“You’ll have to tell me the ending some time,” Jack manages, finally pushing the edge of unconsciousness.

-x-

First draft pick goes to the Las Vegas Aces. Second pick goes to the Seattle Schooners. That’s a seventeen hour drive, a two and a half hour flight. In other words, no more seeing Jack at least once a week, much less every day. And Kent kind of knew this was coming, of course he did, it’s not like he kept ignoring it until he recognized that it wouldn’t go away. Only that’s kind of what he did, and they’re a few weeks out from the draft, and Kent much prefers the ten minute drive between their billet houses than the miles that will span between them once the professional preseason starts up.

Kent is midway through planning the best route between the two cities when Jack edges the door of their hotel room open, falling back on the bed away from the window and rolling half-heartedly towards Kent. “Trouble with the rest of the team?” Kent asks, pushing away the map and walking over to the bed with Jack in it.

“Fucking goalies,” Jack moans, running his hand over his face. “Sparky needed me to lose his room key for him, because apparently he lost his room key last game and we won. And then Raider and Babs clogged the toilet in their room, so I had to help sort that out. I’m done fixing other people’s messes for the night.” He moves his hand and cracks an eye to stare out at Kent with. “Don’t tell me that you made a mess here, too,” he instructs, but it comes out more like a plea.

Diving onto the bed, Kent tucks his head between Jack’s shoulder and neck. “Not unless you wanna make a mess,” he taunts, grinning widely.

Despite himself, Jack laughs and rolls his eyes. “Terrible line, Parson.”

Raising an eyebrow, Kent watches Jack’s pupils dilate slowly. “That depends. Is it working?”

With a swallow, Jack tears his eyes over to the wall. “You’re going to think I’m dumb,” he starts, waving Kent away when the younger boy goes to interrupt him. “But we didn’t have sex last year. Oh, God, I hate myself. Superstitions are the worst,” he moans.

It’s not exactly the kind of moan that Kent was going for. “Okay, I hear you, but we didn’t win. Maybe that’s because we weren’t having sex.” He pauses, and Jack lands a hand between them, trying to shove Kent over, and he wiggles away, shrugging him off easily. “No, no, listen. We need to start a new tradition.”

“The tradition of us having sex,” Jack deadpans skeptically.

Kent wiggles his hips. The effect is lost, because he’s laying down, but it gets his point across. “If we’re gonna win, you’ve got to give it your all, Zimms. Come on, do it for the hockey gods,” he taunts, laughing when Jack rolls his eyes once before launching himself at him.

-x-

“I told you!” Kent shouts, flying across the ice to tackle Jack into the boards. “I told you that we were going to win! Memorial Cup, how about that?” he screams, smile widening with every teammate that crashes into them, all shouting the same sentiments of joy and victory. They’re all out on the ice, yelling and shouting because it feels good, because they worked hard for this, and everyone saw Jack’s perfect goal, sliding into the net like it made for it.

Jack is smiling hard enough that his cheeks are surely starting to hurt from it, but if it’s anything like Kent’s feeling right now, he’s too excited to notice that. “God, we really did it,” he chokes out, only just loud enough for Kent to hear over their teammates yelling.

He is blindingly beautiful like this, Kent realizes, hair plastered to his face with sweat and that beatific smile lighting up the whole arena.

Shoving his helmet off, Jack yells at the team, and it takes a few times for everyone to realize he’s saying “shake hands.” They all break apart, still grinning, elbowing everyone around until Jack makes his way to the other team’s captain and Kent follows to the alternate captain. Then, they kind of shake it off, following them and standing a little straighter on their skates as they file in line to see the other team.

When all that’s over with, they stand on the ice, chests heaving, thrilled with the victory that floods through their veins. Kent squeezes past teammates, patting them on the back as he makes his way to where Jack is standing, a little off to the side.

“Memorial Cup winner, future first draft pick. What can’t you do?” Kent asks, laughing and bumping their hips together for a moment.

Twitching a corner of his mouth up, Jack leans on him and says, “With this kind of a rush, I could do anything.” It’s a proclamation, something bigger than what Kent was going for, and Jack’s grin is the same as it was when their teammates were piled on top of them: shining, glorious, beatific. It is the only expression that Kent wants Jack to ever wear again.

Like a miracle, the feeling lasts. Jack is the one who drags Kent to the party that Raider is throwing for the team, and he’s the one who brings up that they should also go to Murray’s party the next night. Kent has never seen anything like it, can only assume that winning must have flipped some switch in Jack, reminded him that this is how hockey is supposed to feel. All of the pressure surrounding the draft and their rookie year is only temporary, and it’ll be worth it when this is what they’re working towards. Magnified a thousand times when it comes to the Stanley Cup instead of the Memorial.

“We fucking won,” Kent shouts, standing on the kitchen table at Murray’s billet house. He’s wobbly, but it’s all good, he’s only had like two cups of house punch, but God only knows what’s in that. Jack is standing next to him, laughing into his neck, cup raised as he echoes the sentiment.

The team gives a shout, overjoyed once more with the sweet memory of the win. Kent coughs loudly, gets their attention, and asks, “Now who the fuck am I beating next in beer pong?” he crows, laughter bubbling up even as he tries to finish his drink.

-x-

That night, Sparky drops them off at Kent’s billet house. “Sure I don’t need to take you back to your place, Jack?” he checks, not even turning the car off as Kent opens the passenger door and piles out, Jack following behind him.

“My billet family would freak if I came home drunk. I don’t exactly want them calling my dad on me,” Jack covers, forcing a smile as Sparky nods with sudden understanding. “Besides, Parse’s got his own little basement apartment, so I don’t have to worry about that here.”

“Plus, Mr. and Mrs. Williams are basically in love with him, so they don’t care when he stays over,” Kent explains, picking his snapback up from the floor of the car and waiting for Sparky to put the car in drive again. “See you at school, man,” he calls.

Sparky salutes them with a grin, accepting the excuses easily. And it’s not like they lied, because Kent’s willing to bet that Mr. and Mrs. Martin would freak if Jack came back drunk and they happened to wake up to see it. It probably would result in a call to Dad Bob, in all honesty, and nobody wants that. It’s easier for Jack to slip unnoticed into Kent’s space in the basement. Besides, everyone knows they’re best friends, it’s not like it’s a big deal.

It’s not like anyone actually knows what’s going on between them, anyway.

Bumping their shoulders together, Jack uses the excuse of warmth to get closer as they walk around to the side of the house so that Kent can unlock the door to the basement. They’re always a little less careful when they’re drunk, if only because Kent’s pretty sure the team chalks it up to them being close in general and hopes that they can put beer goggles at fault for everything else.

Two weeks of school left until graduation, for Kent. Then he’ll be back in New York until the draft, and Jack’s coming back with him for a few days before going to Montreal. It’s almost going to be long enough, but they both know that’s a lie. There’s only one summer left before they’ll be split across the country, and Kent really doesn’t want to have to make the drive from Seattle to Vegas by himself. So it’s not enough time, but they’ve never had enough. Kent’s just thankful that they got the time that they did, ever aware of the seventeenth summer, the summer that could have kept them apart.

“I’ll get water,” Jack volunteers, leaving his jacket on as he grabs two glasses and takes them into the bathroom, where Kent hears the faucet turn on.

Kent goes to sit on his bed and ends up falling – and, okay, maybe he’s had a little more than he thought. He throws a hand onto the mattress to bring a pillow down to his level, shoving his face into the soft, fabric covered memory foam. “I don’t need water,” he protests mildly, staring blearily at Jack and the proffered glass.

Not even dignifying that with a response, Jack tosses his own back and rubs at his eye. “I’m three inches taller than you and a good bit heavier. Plus, you had more to drink than me. Drink the water, Kent,” Jack instructs him, no nonsense as he sets the bottle of Advil on the nightstand.

“Fine,” Kent says, accepting the glass and drinking a fair bit. He sets the glass next to the Advil and stands, unsteady on his feet. Looking between Jack and the pillow as he sets it back on the bed, he asks, “Do you think memory foam really remembers?” It’s a garbled thought, only a segment of what he really wants to ask, but he doesn’t know how to verbalize it any better than that. His head is too heavy to think straight.

Jack pauses from where he’s toeing off his shoes and unbuckling his belt. Tilts his head, actually considering, the thoughtful kind of weight that he gives to the question since he knows that alcohol makes Kent painfully honest and vulnerable more often than not. “I think it does,” he says, finally getting his belt off and climbing onto the bed.

Kent wonders what this pillow remembers, if it recalls how he came super fucking prematurely the first time Jack had rimmed him, shouting out into the pillow to muffle his voice as he came. If he called his mom, or one of his aunts, maybe they’d know a spell. To get the memories out. There are good memories in this thing, he’s sure of it. “Magic is so fucking useful,” he murmurs, falling again, this time onto the bed, landing with his head half on Jack’s shoulder and half on the pillow. “Oof.”

“It would be,” Jack mumbles, and Kent’s about to correct him that it _is_ , even if he can’t really use it, his aunts are good at it and his cousins are probably getting good at it, and it is useful. The thought gets lost when Jack’s hand reaches up and tangles in his hair, tugging on the curls gently until Kent’s face rests fully in the mattress. “Get some sleep, Kenny. You can tell me about it in the morning,” Jack instructs, and Kent doesn’t even have time to nod before he’s passed out.

-x-

Graduation is a blur, something that’s not even really necessary. Kent doesn’t need a high school diploma to play in the NHL, but he goes anyway, because his mother says she wants to see him walk across the stage, and the Parson clan descends on Rimouski like vultures, sniffing out photo ops like blood in the water.

Kent is tired, has been standing around in the sun for the last several hours, has posed with every possible variation of his cousins, and just wants to go eat dinner and then leave. He’s riding back to New York with Jack, because that’s better than being squished between Vivian and Victoria and being grilled on his relationship for the entire drive back.

He’s seen the way that they’ve been looking at him, small smirks and playful winks as they shove him and Jack together for “just one more picture” because they “look so cute together.” Jack tolerates it all, though Kent can tell that he’s becoming… Not exactly agitated, but maybe a little unsettled. He’s been getting that way more and more with the upcoming draft, and Kent doesn’t exactly know how to stop it.

Not that he’s ever truly known, but now it seems like it takes more time for Jack to calm down. Overall, things have just been getting more serious.

Taking his cap off and shaking his hair back into its natural place, Kent looks pleadingly over to his mother. “Come on, Mom, we’ve been at this all day. I’m a graduate, now let’s get something to eat,” he gripes, trying to soften the words with a smile. 

He appreciates her being so excited and proud of him, he really does, but it’s all getting to be a little much. Plus, Jack’s been fiddling with the hem of his shirt for the last ten minutes, which means Kent needs to intervene now or else he’ll be doing damage control.

Angelica pauses, looks between his camera and her son before smiling indulgently at him and motioning for his cousins to come closer. “One last one, and we’ll get everybody in it.”

-x-

Unlike the last summer, the stretch of time that pulled Kent almost lazily through the days, the thirty-four days between the Memorial Cup and the 2009 draft move along briskly. It’s too fast, because this is the last summer that they have before moving away from each other and mostly seeing each other through grainy web cams. Jack’s stay in New York feels shorter than the drive down had, and every kiss feels a little more desperate, like they’re building up to something.

It’s pretty ridiculous, in all honesty. They’ll say goodbye sometime in August, when they leave for separate cities and Kent goes to make a home out of the apartment he and his mom scouted out in Seattle. It’s not official yet, so he hasn’t signed the lease, but it’s down the street from a coffee shop that has good reviews and there’s a laundromat only a few floors away. There’s two guest bedrooms, presumably for when family comes to visit and he’ll have to tour them around the city well enough to make them believe that he’s doing good on his own.

He will be doing good on his own. Not as great as he would be with Jack, Kent knows, but it’s whatever. It’s unavoidable, and they’ll get through it, and soon enough they’ll be able to pull enough strings to end up on the same team.

“We don’t actually know who’s going first,” Jack reminds him over the phone, voice crackling over the line.

Well, duh, considering the draft’s not for another week. Nobody actually knows. “Zimms, don’t be an idiot. I know you and your mom went to look around at apartments on Wednesday,” Kent says, rolling his eyes and waving at Lucinda through the window when she points to how healthy the garden outside has been these last few weeks. His aunts tell him that the plants are as happy to have him back as they are. The mint has been growing so quickly as to be unruly.

Jack is suspiciously quiet. Kent figured, anyway. “You know I don’t mind going second, right?” he checks, suddenly aware that they’ve never talked about it, because Jack clams up so quickly and Kent’s autopilot mode is set to keep Jack as comfortable as possible.

A stuttering sound, Jack trying to figure out how to use his words like a real adult. Kent decides to keep going and push Jack’s misery off just a little longer.

“Seriously. You’re Jack Zimmermann, of course you’re first pick. ” The very idea that he wouldn’t be is almost laughable, because Jack is just as bit as good as him, if not more, plus he’s a hockey legacy. Every team in the NHL is drooling over the thought of having a Zimmermann on the roster. “And don’t think I’m mad about it, okay? I’m coming in at a close second, and that’s good enough for me. Besides, Vegas is too hot for me anyhow – Seattle is a little more suited to my style.”

That actually gets a laugh out of Jack, and Kent grins in victory. “Vegas is a desert, it’s going to be hot and dry all the time. I’m going to visit you all the time, just to get out of that state,” Jack says, and he sounds… He sounds happy, Kent decides.

“Well, yeah, Zimms,” Kent agrees, rolling his eyes as a smile tugs at his lips. Any option is too ridiculous to think about.

Jack pauses and then checks in, “You’ll be up here soon, right?”

“My flight leaves Thursday morning, and then I’m all yours. Other than the dumb interviews and stuff,” Kent says, casting his eyes over to the suitcase that he’s set at the other end of his room. It’s half packed, mostly because his mom keeps trying to figure out the perfect tie to match the Schooner’s colors. “Is your mom making me stay in the guest bedroom across from her and Bob again?”

The sound of a snort comes over the line, and Kent pictures Jack sitting around in his living room, watching old games that he doesn’t even have to look at because he’s seen them so many times before. Or maybe one of those documentaries he likes to watch when he’s in the mood to bore Kent out of his mind. “Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to get that to change anytime soon. You can try, but if you give her any reason to give me a talk, I’m never going to forgive you.”

Yeah, like Kent’s going to risk that. “I’ll let Alicia do what she wants. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Lucinda looks like she needs help in the garden. I’ll text you before my flight.”

“Do that,” Jack agrees, muffling a yawn behind the speaker.

Jack never gets enough sleep now. Kent wonders if he’s got bags under his eyes now. “Take a nap, Zimms. The documentary will be there when you wake up,” Kent instructs, tossing his phone on the bed as he stands to find shoes suitable for working in the garden.

-x-

“My mom’s flight gets in tomorrow, can we pick her up?” Kent asks, fiddling with the radio station as Jack flicks his hand away from the knob. “Shut up, like you actually want to listen to this dumb country rock shit.”

Jack pulls out of the airport parking lot, looking both ways before turning onto the main road. “I actually do want to listen that, since that’s what I enjoy. And yeah, of course we can pick her up. Is it just her coming? What time does her flight get in?” he asks, fingers tapping on the steering wheel in time with the beat of the pop song that’s now coming out of the speakers.

Checking his phone, Kent scrolls through a text conversation and then nods to himself. “She’ll land at 10 am, it says,” he clarifies, holding his phone out to Jack for proof, who doesn’t look away from the road, just reaches up and pushes it back down. “And they all wanted to, but I convinced Mom to get them to stay back. I mean, not all of them would have come. Vivian’s in Rome, and Olivia just moved into her apartment in Atlanta where she’s studying with some piano guy. Victoria is insanely jealous,” he says, going in detail on what the cousins will be getting up to over the summer.

Quickly, Jack goes through the various Parson cousins, with their blonde hair and freckles that make them all look like slightly varied clones of each other. Vivian and Victoria are Helena’s daughters, Kent’s favorite aunt. Olivia is Eliza’s daughter, and Jack really doesn’t know much about either of them other than Olivia studies the piano and plays with Vivian at Julliard. Another thing about the Parsons is that they are all insanely talented in their field.

“You guys are all getting to that point where you’re about to move out,” Jack comments, braking as the light ahead flips from green to yellow. He’s jittery for reason, unable to calm down even with Kent beside him. It’s too much to act like nothing’s happening, like tomorrow won’t basically decide the rest of his career for him.

Kent hums, almost thoughtfully, as though he hasn’t given it the consideration before. It wouldn’t be that surprising, Jack thinks, mostly because Kent’s lived away from home the past two years. It is sometimes hard to remember that other things still happen when you are not there to see them. At least, he shrugs. “Yeah, weird.”

That seems to be the end of it, and Jack runs his hand through his hair in a tell that isn’t exactly self-conscious, born of nerves and the stress that’s building between his shoulder blades. He’s not used to driving in this much traffic, the route between Rimouski and Montreal less crowded than these roads. And he feels stupid, because he shouldn’t even feel like this, Kent keeps saying that it’s going to be one of the best days of their lives.

“You good, Zimms?” Kent asks suddenly, breaking through the silence, arching an eyebrow like Jack’s carefully cultivated cool isn’t actually working on him.

Jack startles, hands gripping the steering wheel tighter as he focuses on the road, thinking about the pills in his pocket and how his fingers itch to take another one. “I’m great,” Jack manages, forcing his lips into what’s probably a poor excuse of a smile.

Kent doesn’t ask again.

-x-

“Mom,” Kent chokes out as soon as Angelica’s picked up the phone.

Immediately, she knows that something’s wrong. “Kenny? What happened, sweetie?” she asks, clutching the phone a little desperately but unable to relax her hand when her son sounds like that, like someone’s just yanked everything from him.

It is the tone that she feared last year, that seventeenth summer gearing up towards something until it wasn’t, that Kent would call and sound like this – raw, desperate, broken. That she would be so far away, unable to help. No, no, this must be different though – the curse didn’t touch him, the gods saw that he didn’t deserve their punishment. Angelica tries to comfort herself with that as she listens to Kent’s ragged breathing over the line.

“It’s Jack,” Kent manages, voice cracking at the end.

Around her, the airport bustles with activities. Families readying themselves for hard-earned vacation plans, business women and men getting ready to go on trips, and her, standing by the terminal, praying that they won’t call for boarding until she knows that her son is safe. “Are you okay? What happened? Are you safe?” she asks. She can’t stop herself, these are the most important questions.

Angelica likes Jack Zimmermann. He’s a good kid, and he’s a good boyfriend to Kent, but that doesn’t mean that Kent isn’t her top priority. Not by a long shot.

A rattled breath, and then Kent sighs, “Mom, he overdosed.”

Immediately, there are questions that comes to mind. _Overdosed on what? Did you know he was using? Is he going to be alright? Are you alright? Where are you? Are you hurt?_ Angelica only lets herself ask one. “Are you with Alicia and Bob?” God, don’t let him be alone right now. He shouldn’t be alone right now.

“Yeah, uh. We’re at the hospital.” Kent stops, swallows something that sounds like a sob, and then asks, pitifully, “When does your plane get in?”

Automatically, Angelica looks at her watch and then at her ticket. “We’re going to board in five minutes. I’ll get a taxi to the hospital, you’ll need to text me the name.” There’s still too much going on, too many questions to ask, and she holds them in. _Do you use, too? Did he overdose on purpose? Is he going to be alright? Are you alright?_

She steadies herself. Kent must be alright, because he didn’t mention that he wasn’t. He’s with Bob and Alicia, and if he wasn’t alright they’d help him – they’re in a hospital, so if anything was wrong they could help him immediately. The other questions, unreasoned and unasked, linger in her mind, but there’s nothing to be done about them now. At the gate, the flight attendants are checking boarding passes. “Stay there, baby. I’m coming.”

-x-

Jack wakes up, once, near four in the morning. Kent is curled on the chair next to the bed, and Bob has been trying to track down Jack’s doctor through the network of phone numbers that a nurse passed to him. Alicia was in the room before Kent fell asleep, but now she’s probably wandering around the hospital, trying to get lost in the halls.

“Kenny?” Jack asks, voice cracking. A nurse mentioned that his throat would be sore from the stomach pump.

Immediately, Kent scrambles off the chair and towards the bed, reaching over and trying to find Jack’s hand in the darkness. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” he says nonsensically.

There are so many things that he wants to say, but Kent doesn’t know that he’s ever really had the words. He would say more, if only he knew how. Jack is here, though, groggy but here, the pills no longer clouding his consciousness and keeping him from them.

Twisting in the bed, Jack accidentally pulls at an IV and hisses. He doesn’t ask where he is, that much is clear. “Tell me a story,” he whispers, taking Kent’s hand and pulling them together so that their fingers interlocked.

A dry laugh punches its way out of Kent’s chest. “I don’t know any stories,” he confesses, leaning forward and pressing his lips on the first piece of Jack that he can find, somewhere near his chin and nowhere close enough to his mouth to make a real kiss out of the thing. “What story do you want?”

“You said it had a happy ending,” Jack croaks, eyes slipping shut as he fights to keep them open. He twists again, in the opposite direction, only wincing slightly when the IV adjusts with him. “I want a happy ending.”

A happy ending, sure enough. Kent blinks, thinks about stories, and then stops himself from groaning. “I did say that,” he acknowledges, running his thumb across Jack’s wrist gently. Alicia will be back soon enough, Jack might even be asleep before then, so Kent needs to be quick about it.

Jack groans, a soft and disgruntled sound as he rolls his head to the side. “How can a curse have a happy ending?” he mumbles softly, the question coming off quiet and contemplative.

“It didn’t, for a while,” Kent admits, resting his chin on the edge of the bed. “The girls changed their names and had sons, but the gods only punished them worse for trying to hide. The family went on, and the curse remained. As history changed, the girls didn’t have boys anymore.” 

Kent can’t say that he blames his grandmother, or his aunts. He runs his tongue over his teeth, trying to think of the best way to say it, but Jack’s eyelids threaten to slip closed once again, so he speeds up.

“One of the girls had another boy, eventually, and the boy was cursed like the generations before him,” Kent elaborates, speeding up. There isn’t time to talk about the longest summer of Kent’s life, the overbearing sun and the way that the waves echoed through the days.

There isn’t time to talk about the way that his heart beat quicker every time that Jack texted him, ready for terrible news, something that would rip them apart, something that would mean the curse still remembered him.

He curls his fingers over Jack’s hand, squeezing lightly and smiling as Jack blinks and grins lazily at him. “The boy fell in love, though,” he whispers, and it comes out like the confession it is. “The boy fell in love, and the gods had mercy on him. They let the curse pass him by, because he’d given up his lover so that the curse wouldn’t harm them. They saw his sacrifice, and they let him be.” Biting his lip, he can’t help the small grin he gives.

Jack’s forehead wrinkles as he draws his eyebrows together in confusion. “The gods stopped the curse because of true love?” he asks, stretching his neck uncomfortably.

“Looks that way,” Kent says, and he knows how it sounds. He knows that it’s the classic fairytale ending, that he falls in love and the curse falls away and he gets the boy and the ride into the sunset. He’s still a bit amazed it’s worked out that way, honestly.

Rolling his shoulders, Jack tries to prop himself up better before giving up. “That’s a stupid ending,” he grumbles, twisting for a moment as he moves his hand and brings Kent’s with it. “Those kinds of things don’t just happen; you know that.”

Believe him, Kent knows. Kent knows that so well that it’s been inscribed on his heart, and he’s only had a few months to try and wash it away. “Sometimes,” he argues, too relieved that Jack is here with him to argue much. “But sometimes things work out. Don’t you believe it, that it all works out in the end?”

Jack blinks, sleep creeping in at the edges. His body must be exhausted, having to fight for so long. “No,” he says, leaning back again, curling into the pillow with the air of finality.

-x-

Angelica arrives in the hospital to find her son in a shouting match with Alicia Zimmermann, Bob Zimmermann sitting down quietly, taking up more room than the waiting room chair wants to allow him.

“It doesn’t matter that he didn’t ask for us! You were only there because I spoke to the nurses, because I asked them to allow you that much!” Alicia snaps, pale-faced and clenching her hands so that her nails bite into her palms. Her blond hair, which Angelica had only ever seen meticulously coiffed until this occasion, is slipping out of its bun and curling at the back of her neck.

“How was I supposed to get you?” Kent demands sharply, eyes flashing under the florescent lights. “My phone’s been dead since we got here, and you weren’t nearby. You couldn’t even stand to be in the room – you were walking through some random hallway, I didn’t even know if you were on this floor or not!” He’s standing straighter than he usually does, arms tucked into his sides and nose upturned.

Nostrils flaring, Alicia jerks back and makes a wounded noise, chin wobbling. “He is my son, and you should have known that comes before being whatever the fuck he is to you!” she shouts, one hand moving back to find something to steady herself on.

Bob’s hand finds hers, reaching out to catch his wife before she says anything more. The touch grounds Alicia immediately, and she seems to realize what she’s said as Kent sinks down into a seat, utterly defeated.

“Kent,” Angelica says, not sparing Alicia a glance as she moves through the various chairs and end tables that only serve as obstacles between her and her son at this point. She is going to take him so far away from all of this, away from these people and this hospital and that boy, who is probably unconscious behind those doors.

The effect is instantaneous. 

Kent jolts up, standing and reaching out as his eyes water. Alicia pulls herself up and turns with shameful eyes, trying to make some kind of nonverbal apology that Angelica won’t have anything of, not after what that woman said to her son. Bob gives no reaction, still staring at the doors that Jack is presumably behind.

“I forgot what time your flight came in, I’m so sorry, you should have texted me,” Kent babbles, and he lets himself be pulled in for a hug. He sags into it, clearly desperate for her touch, and something sharp and ugly inside of her rears its head as Alicia covers her mouth with the hand that isn’t tangled in Bob’s, tears gathering quickly at the corners of her eyes.

Angelica doesn’t care what may have happened to this woman’s son, what Kent couldn’t or wouldn’t get her for. What matters is that Kent is safe in her arms, whole and shaken but he’ll get through this no matter how many charms she has to cast. “It’s all right, baby,” Angelica soothes him, turning away from them.

It’s still early, not even five in the morning yet. There are a few other people in the waiting room, two adults huddled together quietly and ignoring them, and one young man who looks vaguely interested but turns away when Angelica makes eye contact, looking down at his phone and the newspaper in his lap. The blinds are open, but no sunlight rushes in. Instead, everyone is illuminated in the light from the flickering florescent bulbs on the ceiling. Kent is paler than he should be, by this point in the summer.

When Jack visited them, he was as unfailingly polite as ever. A little more stressed, but so was Kent, with the draft so soon. A major change, something that would pull them further from their families and push them deeper into the world of hockey. At the time, she hadn’t thought anything of it.

She waves the thought away. There’s nothing to be done about it now, and she already spent the flight thinking of signs that she could have missed. Undoubtedly, Kent, Bob, and Alicia have done the same.

“We can go and bring back breakfast,” she suggests, the thought having just come to mind. It seems like a good idea, though. They’ve been awake all night, they will undoubtedly be awake for the foreseeable future, and it will get Kent away from Alicia Zimmermann before that woman snaps again and Angelica has to do something drastic.

Bob nods, relief showing in his face. “There’s a 24-hour place down the road,” he says, wrapping his wife’s hand in his and shooting Alicia a worried look. 

Tight-lipped and pale, Alicia nods. “That would be nice,” she ventures to say, and it takes everything in Angelica not to yank Kent away from her and shove him into the car and drive away.

A beat passes and then Kent speaks up, tentative, looking at the floor. “Mom, I think I’d rather stay here. In case he, uh, wakes up again,” he says carefully, almost a whisper.

That explains it. Kent was there when Jack woke up, and Alicia wasn’t. Bob, presumably, also wasn’t there. Angelica pauses, glances over to where Alicia is pointedly not saying anything, eyes on the wall as her hand grips Bob’s tighter. Bob, too, is quiet.

“You haven’t left the hospital since you got here; some fresh air will do you good,” Angelica says, and she pulls him away before anyone can think of continuing the discussion. She’ll bring back oatmeal and pancakes and hash-browns and the biggest pot of coffee that she can find.

-x-

They leave for the draft, after Jack has woken up and the day shift nurses won’t let Kent into the room no matter what Bob says to them. After that, there’s really no point once Alicia announces, smile splitting her face, that Jack is fine, will make a full recovery.

Kent is so thankful that he lets himself be lead to the car, Bob taking him by the elbow and saying things that only serve to make Kent paler. Angelica overhears “rehab” and “recovery” and “first pick” more times than she can count. She can connect the dots, knows that the apartment they looked at in Seattle won’t be the lease they sign, and she’ll need to start looking at real estate agents in Las Vegas.

By the time they get out of the car, Kent looks more like himself. Shaken, but not completely overcome. No doubt reminding himself of how Jack will come through this, he leaves to do pre-draft interviews and assures her, time and time again, that he really will be fine, that she has nothing to worry about.

Angelica takes the time to grab her phone, which up until now has been on silent. She picks up just as a call from Eliza comes in. “What happened?” she asks, eyes following Kent as he makes his way through reporters.

“The smoke isn’t rising,” Eliza explains without preamble, voice shaking. “I came into the kitchen to get a leaf from Mom’s African Violet, and I noticed the sprig of mint that Lucinda left burning. The smoke wasn’t rising, Angelica, where are you? What’s going on?” she demands, shrill and insistent.

Immediately, Angelica straightens, only a few paces behind as she follows her son. “We just got to the draft, he’s fine, nothing’s wrong. I’m looking at him now, he’s fine,” she says, almost willing it to be true.

Her heart is pounding. After all these years, this is the call she has dreaded. Since Kent was born and her mother stood over her, asking the question that has rang through Angelica’s ears since then. _How will the gods know when to punish him?_

“Angelica, what’s going on? The smoke _isn’t rising_!” Eliza snaps, worry seeping through her tone.

This can’t be happening. Lucinda started burning the mint when they found out about Jack, she said it was still rising. It was rising only an hour ago, she talked to Lucinda before they drove over. Nothing has changed, nothing has changed since they left the hospital – this can’t be happening.

“He’s just standing there, I’m watching him now! He’s going to do interviews,” Angelica says, straining to hear what they’re saying. It sounds like what Bob was saying earlier, “first pick” and “Aces” and “rehab” because apparently it’s hit the news already that Jack Zimmermann has withdrawn from the draft. 

Kent isn’t smiling, but he’s dealing with it, agent at his side as he answers certain questions. He seems to know which reporters to listen to and which to ignore, and Angelica knew that she shouldn’t have let him go away from home in the first place. There’s a sinking feeling in her stomach, something that tells her that it’s all going to go wrong soon enough.

-x-

The Las Vegas Aces draft Kent Parson, and Angelica still can’t figure out how the curse has hit. She’s spent an hour on the phone with her sisters, Helena asking every question that she could think of. They’ve got it narrowed down to one thing – it has to do with Jack.

A reason for screaming. The hardest hit imaginable, and for Kent, that can only mean Jack.

None of them can figure out what it has to do with Jack, though. The doctors announced that he was fine, would make a full recovery, and Angelica doesn’t have any voicemails from either of the Zimmermanns that say the opposite. All Angelica can figure is that he’ll sit out the draft, go in next year. Would that be a reason for screaming for Kent? Would that be enough?

Hockey can’t mean more to him than Jack does, not when Angelica’s seen Kent’s secret smiles around the house as he slips behind doors with a phone pressed to his ear. Not when she’s seen them steal kisses in the living room when Jack’s reasonably sure no one’s looking and Kent doesn’t care anyway. It doesn’t make sense.

“You need to bring him home,” Helena presses, an urgency in her tone. “The smoke is thick, and it’s sinking so that it’s covering the kitchen floor. It’s heavier than it was when it started.” Angelica can hear Helena’s heels on the floor, tapping out a fast-paced rhythm that echoes. 

“He’s fine, he’s accepting the jersey – we didn’t plan for Vegas, but it’s not the end of the world. Certainly not something that would qualify as the curse,” Angelica confides, watching her son climb the steps.

How is he going to protect himself? He doesn’t even use magic, he barely knows how to use magic. He can assemble a potion, but Angelica doesn’t even know if he could properly use one. He doesn’t know enough for charms or even basic protection spells, certainly not ones of the strength he needs.

She shouldn’t have sent him away. It was so easy at the time, convincing herself it was the right decision. It was the right decision for everyone – Kent wanted it, Miriam agreed, and Angelica’s sisters had been hesitant but supportive after Kent explained his reasoning. Angelica should have fought him, have kept him close to home, trained him in the type of magic he’d need to prepare for the curse.

It is not the seventeenth summer, but the gods never forget those in their debt.

-x-

At the hospital, after the draft is over and Kent has pulled off a black and white jersey that washed his skin out in the streetlights as they drove, then it becomes clear.

She and her sisters were right, as it turned out. It is Jack, but not in the way that Angelica feared with flat-lined monitors and chest compressions and the Zimmermanns crying in the corner as Kent stood to the side and watched in shock and horror. No, no, in many ways it is much worse.

The nurses still won’t let them in to Jack’s hospital room, but one of them fetches Alicia and Bob, who come out with grave expressions. They do not wear the same kind of exhaustion that they wore early in the morning.

“When are they going to let people who aren’t family in?” Kent asks, looking every bit of his seventeen years as he glances down the hall, quietly furious.

Bob steps forward, a minute movement that allows Alicia to shift slightly behind him as he takes a deep breath. “They’re letting non-family members in,” he confesses, watching the confusion that clouds Kent’s eyes. “Jack asked for you to not be.”

There is a pause, something painfully long and jagged, like a knife that Angelica is watching being pressed into her son’s heart. Kent takes a small, automatic step back, his body on auto-pilot as it tries to remove itself from the source of the pain. He blinks, unsure and unsteady.

Angelica’s heart weighs heavy in her chest, something that is beating too slowly for this moment.

“He doesn’t want to see me?” Kent asks with the smallest of tremors in his voice.

Alicia nods briskly, like she’s been forcing herself to come to terms with this same thing. Alicia may never have been Kent’s biggest fan, but surely she is finding this just as strange as Angelica. Jack is Kent’s boyfriend, of course Jack wants to see him, surely there must be some kind of misunderstanding.

Sighing heavily, Bob lets a hand rest on Kent’s shoulder. “We’re sorry, son,” he says, and it sounds like he means it.

“No,” Kent tries, because this doesn’t make sense, nothing is adding up. “I need to see him, he can’t just – I need to see him,” he repeats, the words standing in for so much. “Did he say why?”

Silence hangs over them for a moment, and then Alicia flinches, reaching out and touching Kent’s hand lightly as she steps back. “I’ll talk to him,” she whispers, eyes shining when she turns from him to the hallway.

“Alicia,” Bob says quietly, trying to be firm but it comes out resigned.

“I’ll _talk_ to him,” she answers, walking to the hall and going quickly through the doors.

So this is the curse, Angelica thinks, looking over to where Kent stands with his shoulders held straight and chin jutting out. All those years ago, how could she have known? How could she have foreseen the pain in his eyes, the defensive way that he clenches his jaw? A summer, a whole summer, and this is not even the first hour. She doesn’t know if she can really be expected to stand aside while this happens.

Bob sighs, moving to catch Kent’s shoulder. “You know he has to be our first priority now,” he explains, and there’s enough guilt in that statement to make Kent’s shoulders sag suddenly from the weight of it.

Still, Kent doesn’t give in. “He was _always_ my first priority,” he retorts, but he looks less sure now. If it were a day earlier, Angelica knows that he wouldn’t hesitate in making that kind of statement, in believing it. It isn’t a day earlier, though. Too much has happened for him not to doubt himself.

They pause, Bob not bothering to respond as he closes in on himself, quietly looking away as a door swings open and Alicia makes her way into the room at a brisk pace. Her heeled sandals smack loudly on the tiled floor.

“You need to speak quieter, you can’t upset him,” she whispers, eyes flicking wildly between all of them as she approaches Kent, who has automatically moved toward her. He takes a breath of relief when she pulls him forward with her, bringing him into the room where Jack must be.

Angelica doesn’t move. This is the curse, nothing good can come of it. She should go in there and drag her son out before that boy hurts him more than he already has – there is nothing more to be said between them.

When Alicia walks back over to them, Kent still in Jack’s room, Bob places an arm around his wife’s waist and pulls her in closer for comfort. It is something that Angelica cannot imagine, Kent being in this situation, her in their stead as she waits to hear from doctor after doctor. She also cannot imagine being the only one waiting; the room would be flooded with her sisters and her nieces, all quiet in case they might break the fragile silence.

“How could we have not known?” Bob whispers, something private only meant for Alicia’s ears.

For a moment, Angelica is ashamed for intruding on them and their aborted grief, but she turns her attention to the hall and watches for her son. He will come back to her, most likely worse for the wear but not beyond repair, and they will leave. She will not have to feel like an intruder for much longer.

-x-

When Kent does emerge, he is white faced and doesn’t spare Bob or Alicia a glance.

“We need to go,” he announces, picking up the hat he’d left on an end table. He will not meet Angelica’s eyes and looks past her, studying the wall with its poster about regular health check-ups.

Alicia watches him carefully, glancing back to where Jack is. She seems to be trying to determine which of the boys is hurting more, and she flinches when Bob touches her hand. “Kent,” she begins, drifting away and dropping off completely when she realizes she has nothing left to add.

“You have our numbers if you need us,” Bob tells him, trying so very hard to be the voice of reason.

Giving a tight nod, Kent pats his pockets and checks for his wallet and cell phone. He looks very much like a boy who needs his mother, and Angelica reaches out for him instinctively, trying to give some sort of balm for the wound. 

Angelica has the number of the taxi service that she called to get to the hospital still, so she brings that up and calls them, watching from the corner of her eye how Kent is stiff and nearly immobile, looking at the ground as Bob and Alicia trade worried glances and try to get her to do anything but stare blankly back at them.

When it’s settled, she hangs up and squeezes Kent’s shoulder. “They’re on their way, we can catch a flight out tonight,” she announces, looking around for Kent’s bag and then stilling. It’s at the Zimmermann’s, they can ship it to New York or leave it here for all that she cares. Angelica doesn’t want to be in Montreal for one more moment.

Kent nods, jaw set, finally looking up and meeting her eyes.

Angelica tries desperately to think of a time where Kent has seemed smaller than this. At the beach house, the summer that they thought would hold the end of all things, he tried to make himself smaller, so that the gods wouldn’t notice him as easily. Still, it wasn’t like this. Not this hunched-over, wide-eyed look of surprise that hasn’t changed since they left the hospital.

Maybe he looked worse than this, when he rode in the ambulance over to the hospital, that first time. When no one could be sure at all, least of all Kent. Maybe then he looked smaller than this, this defeated look in his eyes that haunts him. That’s the only possibility that Angelica can think of.

She wasn’t there, though. She’ll never know for sure.

“Come on,” she says, pressing him gently to the elevator doors. Kent goes easily, stepping forward without thought as he follows instructions.

Suddenly, he stops and turns around, looking to Bob desperately. “Can you keep me updated? Just say that he’s doing okay, or, fuck, just that he’s alive,” he pleads, voice cracking at the end. His eyes are shining brilliantly.

Swallowing, Alicia nods first. Carefully, but determinedly, she announces, “Of course.”

-x-

The drive home, Kent doesn’t speak. He makes call after call, never saying anything, finally buying a car charger when they stop to get gas. The sound of Jack Zimmermann’s voicemail echoes through the front of the car, and at this point Angelica could recite it from memory, even going so far as to give the same monotonic inflection of the young man. She wants to burn Kent’s phone, but somehow she manages not to.

That boy is going to the finest rehab facility that money can buy, and no doubt his parents will travel with him, make every visitation day and they’ll blink sadly at each other in a therapist’s office for several months when the whole ordeal is finally over with.

Her son will go to Vegas, probably still calling that voicemail just as obsessively.

It is too much, simply too much. Angelica drives quickly, because she can’t stand to be away from her sisters for this long. It will be good to get Kent around family, good for him to be around his cousins. The girls will find some way of consoling him, surely, and Angelica doesn’t even care that it will only be good for as long as he’s not playing in the NHL. There are so many things, and she simply cannot think of them all.

Her sisters have gathered on the porch when they start down the driveway. Kent leans his head on the window and blinks, finally setting his phone on the seat when he sees them. “Where are the girls?” he finally asks, glancing at the windows and trying to find fluttering curtains as his cousins dodge out of sight.

If Angelica knows her sisters, the girls have seen such a talking to that they know not to interrupt for the moment. “You can see them later,” she answers, pulling the car into the garage and removing the key. They only have a minute or so of peace before they have to go meet her sisters.

“I’m always here for you, baby. No matter what,” she informs him, first and foremost. Kent needs to know this before he knows anything else. 

He knows, not meeting her eyes. “I know.” It is a slower response than usual, but Angelica squares her shoulders. They’ll get through this.

-x-

The aunts are clumped together on the steps of the porch, unwilling to break away from each other even as they watch him with cautious eyes. It would be amusing, Kent thinks, if it were any for any other reason.

Helena is the first to move away, pulling free from Eliza’s arm on her shoulder as she grabs the railing. Her arms are around him before he’s even started up the stairs, and it takes a moment to sink in. He didn’t want to be touched. He really and truly didn’t want to be touched, and it all hits him in a wave.

Jack isn’t going to call him back. It’s not going to happen, and the last memory that Kent will have of Jack Zimmermann, his boyfriend, his best friend, the love of his life, is Jack strapped to a hospital bed with large eyes and a scratchy voice. _Leave, Parse._

He’s shaking before he knows it, and he can barely make out the soothing sounds Helena is making over the sobs that shake through his chest.

“I watched him almost die,” Kent chokes out, leaning on her as Eliza and Lucinda bracket him at his sides, his mother standing behind him. He hasn’t slept since, but he knows he’ll be having nightmares of that for years to come: Jack in the ambulance, EMTs scrambling around them, Kent pushing himself into the corner and trying to make himself as small as possible. “I almost let him die.”

Helena grips his shoulder tightly, pulling him until she’s looking his eyes straight on. “You did not,” she vows, the promise tremulous between them. “You could not have helped him, do you understand me? You’re a seventeen year old boy, you can’t have been expected to help him.”

“He was mine, I should have – it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he manages, because it wasn’t. He was supposed to wear Seattle’s colors, not the black and white that Jack was planning on wearing. He wasn’t supposed to spend the night before the draft in the waiting room of a hospital with Bob and Alicia.

Fuck, he’d know that Jack was having problems, that Jack was struggling, but he hadn’t thought that it could be anything like this. It was supposed to be fine, it was all supposed to be fine.

He was supposed to be lucky, the boy the gods forgave. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

“Where is he?” a voice calls, forcing its way through the cluster of women who surround him, pulling them apart until Kent can see his grandmother properly. Out of habit, he straightens.

At the sight of him, she leans forward and touches his arm gently, her hand a soft kind of shaking thing that reminds him Alicia in the waiting room, pale and distraught. Miriam’s eyes are clear, though, and she envelopes him without hesitation. “What have the gods done to you?” she whispers.

Kent doesn’t mean to smile, but it happens anyway. A grimace, more so, but something akin to it nonetheless. “What they always promised,” he informs her, years of family lore coming to mind, “they gave me a reason for screaming.”

-x-

By the time they get in the house, the girls in the living room have divided themselves into camps: Victoria and Olivia sit in the arm chairs on the west end, Taylor next to them on the ottoman, and Daphne and Amanda have claimed the east end, curled into the couch. Daphne is napping, but she stirs when the doors open.

Instantly, chaos reigns.

“Are you alright?” Taylor demands, crossing the distance between her and her cousin in only a few strides and thrusting herself into his arms a millisecond before her sisters make it from the other side. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No one tells us anything,” Amanda snaps, glaring at her oldest sister as she tries to worm her way beside Kent. “They said it was the curse; did anyone die? Why didn’t you stay in Montreal like you told us you would?”

“Is Jack coming here?” Daphne asks, leaning over to try and peer around her aunts that block the door. “Did he fly with you or is he going to be driving?”

Victoria and Olivia restrain themselves, nearly identical expressions of horror frozen on their faces. They rush in as their aunts babble excuses, trying to find something that will stick.

Pulling her youngest cousins aside, Victoria doesn’t bother looking at Kent. “What did we tell you about asking questions?” she demands, voice severe. “I can’t believe you would be so disrespectful as to ask him something like that, after everything that we told you.”

Kent peels away from Taylor and approaches them with soft steps, accepting them as they rush up to him and chatter on in worry. “Tori, don’t bother with it,” he dismisses, wrapping his arms around Amanda and Daphne. “Don’t,” he snaps when she opens her mouth to respond.

Abruptly, Victoria draws her shoulders back and pinches her lips, glancing to her mother briefly before turning away. She moves quickly through the room, pausing only to throw off Olivia’s arm when the older girl reaches out.

“Don’t mind her. She’s been in a bad mood since Vivian left,” Olivia comments, drawing Kent over once Daphne and Amanda have let him leave them. “Come on, I’ll make some tea.”

-x-

In the kitchen, Kent lets his head rest on his hands and peers up at Olivia through bleary eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he explains. He’s mostly sure it’s unnecessary, anyway, judging by the sardonic raised eyebrow that Olivia deigns to give him from where she’s sorting through tea bags.

“Well that’s good, because I wasn’t going to ask,” she comments, finally plucking two tea bags out and placing them on the counter next to the mugs. “And in case you were wondering, we don’t have the mint tea anymore because Daphne tried a charm and now everyone gets drunk on the stuff. Don’t ask.”

Nodding, Kent accepts his tea and stares into the drink. For a moment, Olivia thinks that he’s going to say that he didn’t want any after all or that it’s too hot to drink in June, but he just pauses. “Thanks,” he says finally.

It is startling, Olivia thinks, to see him like this. While she knows that she hasn’t been close to Kent in years, a combination of her own concern about the curse and him living in another country, he’s never seemed so quiet or docile before. So this is what the curse does, takes a person and reduces them to nothing, only the bare bones of what they were before.

Olivia sips her tea and silently decides that bringing sons into the world would be a very cruel thing.

-x-

The summer he spent at the beach was worthless. All of the worrying, the prayers he sent up, half thought out and mostly spun from hope alone, did nothing in the end. He doesn’t know that anything could have helped, that anything could have prepared him for this kind of pain.

It is as though the gods are punishing him both for being cursed and for trying to hide from it.

Kent calls and calls, surely keeping Jack awake at points if the ringer is up, and he wonders if Jack bothers to keep it on instead of on silent. He wonders if Jack thinks of listening to the ringer as a method of penance, forgoing forgiveness because he’s always been too much of machoist for that kind of thinking. He wonders how much is the curse forcing Jack to act this way, how much of this is the curse merely acting through the way Jack would have acted anyway.

The latter is too painful to think about, so Kent tries not to. He’d rather believe in a world without free will if it means his best friend would still choose to see him.

A summer, a single summer. That’s all it will take for the curse to end, that’s all before he can go back to Jack and they’ll reunite with open arms. Kent knows that it’s not much time, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still too much. He thought that they had forever, he thought the gods had forgotten him, he didn’t know that he should have been looking for this all the same.

-x-

Everyone speaks in hushed tones around him, and Kent misses the chaos of his childhood. If his family only pretended that things were normal, maybe they would be able to trick him into believing it too. If they kept practicing their magic and rushing through the halls like usual, it would be easier to pretend that nothing’s happened.

He’ll be eighteen in a week, and in a month he’ll move to Vegas to start playing with the team that had undoubtedly been expecting a very different first draft pick to join them.

His cousins are quiet, soft smiles when they meet his eyes for too long, and even the younger ones don’t say much around him anymore. He can’t tell if it’s because Victoria and Taylor have yelled at them too often for trying to approach him or if they’re starting to understand the magnitude of what’s happening.

Bob called and spoke about a rehab center, somewhere further north than Montreal. He said that Jack is doing well, is going to start therapy at the center, that he and Alicia make weekly visits and go more often when they’re allowed.

Kent imagines somewhere with white tile and chrome fixtures, gray walls and a shitty tv playing in the corner. He knows that’s not right, obviously, Bob and Alicia would never let Jack go somewhere like that, but it’s a hard image to fully dispel. At this point, he’s stopped asking Bob to pass along messages for him.

-x-

Vivian comes home two weeks before anyone knows to expect her, crushing Kent to her before he can tell what’s going on, whispering apologies that don’t make any sense. She couldn’t have done anything anyway.

“No one told me until Victoria called the other day,” she explains, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

It’s bewildering, is what it is. Vivian was in Rome, her program was going to go on until the start of August, and Kent can’t even figure out what she’s doing back in New York. “When did you even leave?” he asks, looking behind her to where his aunts are attempting to nonverbally ask the same thing.

Cutting off a nonsensical laugh, she shrugs. “This morning, last night, I can’t really tell with the time difference,” she explains, finally loosening her hold but still keeping him at arm’s length as she looks at him. “Did you think that I wouldn’t want to know?” she asks abruptly, strangely fragile sounding.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to know, just that he didn’t want to say it. The curse isn’t meant to be a public affair, asking for widespread pity and remorse. It’s a singular thing, something that Kent will have to carry by himself. Asking other to shoulder the burden seems like too much. He doesn’t know how to say that, though, that he can’t sleep without dreaming of Jack on the ice with him where they belong, that the oppressive silence of family has become too much.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he manages, instead.

A second, maybe two, and then Vivian nods, a solemn thing. “I wasn’t going to let you go through this alone.”

Kent remembers her saying something similar, last summer, when she’d first gotten to the beach house. _We weren’t going to let you be alone._ It feels like a promise, and Kent can’t help but believe it.

-x-

He’s walking past the door to one of the libraries when he hears Miriam’s hushed tones working their way through the wood. The worry in them makes him stop, because he’s never heard his grandmother sound worried. Miriam is fierce and prideful and strong, and Kent has never seen her be less than that. He has never thought it possible.

“We don’t know, and you know we don’t. I’ve combed through every piece of the family history. Nothing like it, nothing to go off of, so don’t be angry when you’re the one who brought this upon us,” she hisses.

“You’ve never known. Everything you’ve ever told me has been wrong – the summer after he turned sixteen. That was when you said it would start. It didn’t, nothing happened. Same with seventeen, after all that time we spent at the beach house waiting for something to strike us down. I don’t trust what your intuition tells you,” Angelica snaps, angry seeping into her voice.

“It told me that you would have a boy, and it told me that you would bring him this punishment without his consent. I’d say I’ve been right often enough,” Miriam retorts, and Kent stops moving in shock.

“You’ve never helped that boy a day in his life, don’t act like you care about him! The last time you seemed upset was before he was even born, when you were already angry at him for coming into this world.”

“Born in the summer. How can the gods know when to punish him?” Miriam asks rhetorically.

The thing that gets him going again is hearing her footsteps approaching the door, so he ducks into an alcove and grabs the first book that he happens upon, trying to look lost in its contents. When Miriam walks by, she doesn’t give him a passing glance, and Kent tries not to shake with the effort of containing himself.

-x-

It’s not until later that Kent figures it out.

They don’t know whether the curse goes in full summers, or if it starts in the summer and swings around throughout the year before finishing off. As far as the family history goes, Kent is the first boy born in the summer, and it isn’t clear.

It could be a year before Jack calls him. 

Thinking about the summer, one single summer, was hard enough. A year is a punch to the gut, makes him call Jack twice and often and listen to the voicemail that he could recite from memory by now. It’s useless, he knows that it’s useless, the smoke isn’t rising and Kent should be doing something more productive with his time.

Jack doesn’t answer, which isn’t that much of a surprise. He doesn’t answer, and he must not mention it to Bob, because Bob doesn’t mention it when he calls.

They don’t talk about Jack so much, because it’s too painful for both of them. Instead, Bob tells stories from his rookie year, warnings against not getting enough sleep and drinking too much. He gives advice, too, how to get watch tape and pay attention to the important parts, how to work hard even off the ice.

The conversations help, but they make everything so much more real. He’s going to Vegas in Jack’s place, and there’s more distance between them than a two and a half hour flight can fix.

-x-

That night, cleaning up from dinner, Kent insists on washing the dishes even though Taylor and Olivia volunteer to do it for him. He might be cursed, but he’s not bedridden or something ridiculous. He can wash plates, at least, and they don’t have to act like he’s broken. They keep pressing the matter, though, making up excuses or hedging just close enough to the reason why but not actually saying it out loud.

It’s not until he snaps, “Just because my boyfriend isn’t fucking talking to me doesn’t mean you get to treat me like I’m going to fall apart,” that they back down.

It’s the first time he can remember cursing around the family without an aunt turning around to tell him, “Language.” It feels good. It feels like a breaking point, or a turning point. He doesn’t know if he can tell the difference.

“I’ll help dry,” Vivian offers, simple as though he hadn’t said anything, and it’s only because she’s the only one treating him normally that he lets her follow him into the kitchen.

They’re working their way through the dirty dishes in silence, and it gives Kent time to actually process what’s happening. It feels like the first normal moment since he’s come home, and he exhales as he holds the last dish under the water, soaping it up as he looks out the window into the yard.

“Want to tell me what’s up?” Vivian asks, her familiar tone speaking of curiosity that hinges on overbearing. It would typically be a cause of frustration, just one more thing to be upset about, but Kent knows that she’s only ever had the best intentions when it comes to her family.

Rinsing the plate, Kent shrugs. “Just thinking.”

She hums, waiting for him to continue. When he doesn’t, she reaches over and accepts the final plate. “The curse?” she guesses, like there’s anything else that would be bothering him.

At least she doesn’t sugarcoat it. He washes his hands quickly under the water and finally looks away from the window. “Grandmother was talking to my mom, and I overhead. There’s no way to know whether the curse is going to end this summer or if it will go for a full year, wrap around until next summer.”

He doesn’t say it, but he knows that she must hear it anyway: _If she’s right, that means it’s a year, a full year before Jack will speak to me again. A year without him._

“Curses end,” Vivian answers at last, closing the cabinets now that everything is put away. “Curses end, just like everything else. The time will come, and he will come back to you. Or you to him, however the case may be.”

Squeezing his eyes shut, Kent tries imagine his first NHL season without Jack. He’d been picturing flights to Montreal instead of Seattle recently, which was as far as he was willing to think about it. Now, when he looks to future, tries to find a future without Jack, however brief, he only feels lonely.

An empty apartment, teammates who look at him strangely because he can’t connect with them off the ice, and phone calls to family in New York every night. He’ll have hockey, but he’ll have to give up everything else first.

“I just don’t want to be alone,” Kent finally whispers, avoiding Vivian’s eyes as he flees from the room.

-x-

There is a lull of quiet in the living room, in the morning, when everyone is gathered after breakfast trying to plan the day. Vivian surprises everyone again as she grins at Kent and announces, “I’ve decided to put off going back to Julliard for my DMA.”

Victoria shoots out of her seat so quickly that she bangs her legs on the end table, and Taylor nearly falls out of her own seat in surprise. Amanda and Daphne are exchanging astonished looks, and Olivia’s mouth hangs open from where she stands next to the open piano keys. Angelica uses one hand to hold onto the couch, and Eliza and Lucinda can’t seem to make themselves believe it. Even Miriam seems taken back.

Finally, Helena breaks the silence, looking at her oldest daughter in shock. “Why not?” she asks, leaning forward and resting a hand on Victoria’s shoulder. “You were so excited last time we talked.”

Vivian nods, brushing her long hair over her shoulder. “I’m only going to put it off for a year, maybe two if I have to. It’s still in the plans, but something’s come up.”

Everyone tenses, and Kent finally dares to ask what surely everyone is thinking. “What came up?” he demands, tensing instinctively. Vivian’s been excited to go for her DMA since before she even sent in the application, and he can’t picture anything that would pull her away from it for up to two years.

“I’ve accepted a position at the Las Vegas Opera,” Vivian reveals, and Kent clings to her.

-x-

The apartment that they end up with is moderately sized, will allow Kent his space while allowing Vivian to check up on him without being obvious about it. He’s never been used to having much space, so he doesn’t know why everyone thinks he needs it, but he nods along and signs the lease when it’s presented to him.

August burns bright in Nevada, and it’s not until they’re off the plane that Kent realizes he forgot sunglasses. 

He wasn’t supposed to need sunglasses. Seattle is cloudy all the time, has moderate summers, and he hadn’t bought sunscreen in bulk because it would be unnecessary. That’s what he’d thought at the time.

Kent gets a wardrobe made for a warmer climate, allows the Aces to shower him with merch, and very pointedly does not think about how August was supposed to go, video calls to Jack as they each showed off their new places and talked about what the guys on their teams were like.

The guys on the Aces are good guys, Kent supposes, not that he knows them very well. They seem like good guys, at least, and haven’t really mentioned the fact that he wasn’t exactly who they were expecting.

“Practice is going well,” he informs his mom for what seems like the fiftieth time. “I mean, I haven’t met everyone yet since some people aren’t back from the offseason, but it’s good so far. The coaches are trying to figure out what lines are going to work best for us since they lost some people to trades and have a few new faces.”

Angelica hums on the other end of the line, something soft and lilting that reminds him of when she used to sing to him on nights where he couldn’t manage to sleep. Part of him wants to ask her if she’d be willing to sing him to sleep now, in this strange city that buzzes with neon lights.

People call New York City the city that never sleeps, and Kent believed that until now. Vegas is a land for insomniacs and adrenaline junkies, and the sirens play long into the night. He finds himself awake too often.

“You’ll figure it out,” she informs him, and there’s a pause where she wants to ask about the curse and he wants to answer her, but it’s hard to figure out the right words. “Is Vivian doing alright?”

Glancing into the kitchen, where Vivian is on the phone to her own mother, Kent nods and then answers. “She’s good. She likes her program, from what I can tell.”

He looks out over the balcony and listens as a timer goes off in his mother’s kitchen. Some kind of good luck potion that she’ll try to send to him, undoubtedly. He’d tell her to stop, that he’s not going to use it, but it’s easier to just pour down the drain and pretend that he appreciates her efforts. Besides, he knows that it’s comforting to her, to have control over one small thing.

It feels too much like cheating, especially when he’s never used those things before. She only started offering when the curse began, and Kent doesn’t pity himself enough to risk fucking up one of the last good things he has going for him. It’s too much to think about.

“I’ve got to go, sweetie. Give Viv my love, won’t you?” she asks, waiting for him to agree before hanging up.

Putting his phone back in his pocket, Kent turns away from the balcony and goes back in the apartment. He can ask Vivian to sing something she’s learning for the show. Maybe that will help him finally get some sleep.

-x-

It’s not just the curse. When Kent found Jack, when they’d rode to the hospital, the curse hadn’t started. He knows that, because he’d called Helena in the waiting room, and she’d told him that the smoke was still rising.

Jack’s anxiety isn’t the curse, it’s ridiculous to think that powerful magic would curse Jack instead of Kent, that doesn’t make any sense. The build up to the hospital trip, that wasn’t the curse either. Every time Jack popped a few more pills than prescribed, every time he washed them down with a beer or three, he wasn’t doing that because some form of magic was compelling him to.

The curse just means that Kent can’t be with him apparently. For now, really, that’s all.

He can’t hate Jack for not seeing him. It’s magic, Kent’s seen the sinking smoke enough times to know by now. That’s something out of his control, that he can’t stop, and it doesn’t matter what he thinks about it because it’s not like he can do anything about it anyway.

No, no, what’s worse is what came before the curse. What’s worse is knowing that Kent let it happen – all those months that he didn’t notice and should have. They lived in each other pockets, for Christ’s sake, how did he not realize there was anything wrong when Jack was guzzling medicinal cocktails like it was the prohibition? Zimms isn’t even good at lying, Kent knows that, can think of all the times they were late to practices and Jack stuttered out excuses that were obviously made up.

Maybe Jack is a good liar, maybe he always has been. Maybe he’s a good liar about the important things.

Just because he thought the gods forgave him, thought the curse wasn’t going to touch him because it had seen how good Jack was for him, he thought that if the curse couldn’t happen, nothing bad could. He’d turned a blind eye to the pill popping that Jack progressively became more obvious about. It should have sparked a warning light.

Instead, Kent had been too busy being thankful to bother with being worried.

All those parties. He can’t stop himself from remembering all the times they woke up together in the morning, hazy with hangovers and too much to the touch, but they still couldn’t keep their hands off each other. How many of those nights before had Jack been black out or near it? How many times had been on purpose?

It shakes him to the core, and the Vegas strip is all casinos and bars like the promised land of alcohol and honey. It gives him nightmares, sometimes, thinking of Jack in the ambulance on the ride to the hospital, unconscious as the paramedics worked around him. He thinks he’d prefer the ambulance’s sirens to this silence between them.

When he goes out with the team, he sticks to two beers. No hard liquor, nothing that he likes too much. Nothing he could lose himself with if he’s not careful. It’s easy to convince everyone that he’s been drinking all night so long as he always has a drink in hand.

The team is nice, probably wouldn’t care too much even if Kent didn’t drink. One of the guys, Penny, is a recovering alcoholic, and no one gives him shit when he sits to the side of their gatherings nursing a water with a paper umbrella that the waitresses are only too happy to supply.

So it’s not he’s worried they’d make him drink if he told them, it’s just that it’d be one more thing for them to think about: kid’s too scarred by his friend’s fuck-up to drink anymore. And he’d just rather not have that attention.

Being as anonymous as he can be isn’t something that he’s about to take for granted.

God, if only he hadn’t gone to see Jack that last time. If only Alicia hadn’t begged her son to let him in, then the last he saw Jack would at least be a good memory of sorts. It still stings, but in a different way. More like poison creeping through his veins and less like being stabbed in the jugular.

Cursed boys are never that lucky.

-x-

“Real games don’t even start until October, I could come up,” Kent starts, only just keeping himself calm enough to complete the thought. “If he wants me to, that is,” he forces out, waits to be told that he’s being ridiculous, of course he’ll have to come up.

Alicia sighs, and Kent bites back a plea for her to just please let him come up. “We haven’t talked about that yet. He’s doing good, really good, though. These people know how to help him, and they think he’s doing good, too.”

Kent wonders if Alicia means that Jack is really doing good, or if he’s just doing better. Because as far as Kent’s concerned, breathing on his own and not strapped down in a hospital bed is better to him. Better than what could have happened, but he won’t think about it. “Okay,” he agrees tentatively and hopes it doesn’t sound like he’s asking for too much.

“If he’s still doing as good when he gets home, we’ll see. Bob and I have been talking about maybe staying in the Nova Scotia house for a while. It’s quieter there than Montreal.” She’s quiet, thoughtful, and Kent feels guilty for reasons that he can’t name.

That’s a lie. He can name them, he just doesn’t want to.

Kent’s never been to the Zimmermann’s Nova Scotia house, but he knows that Jack has fond memories of it from when he and his mom would go for a weekend while Bad Bob was on a roadie. “I think Jack would like that,” he responds, and he forces his throat to not close up around Jack’s name.

“Bob thought so, too. That’s probably what we’ll do then, and of course we’ll let you know if you can come up,” she says, careful to not make it sound too definite. Kent hates that she does it, hates even more that she has to do it, and he completely understands. “I just thought I’d call and let you, though. The doctors seem very pleased with the work he’s put into recovery.”

 _I’m sorry for letting him get that bad_ , Kent thinks, and resolutely keeps his mouth shut. _I’m sorry he had to go there in the first place and I couldn’t find him early enough to stop all of this._ Instead, he tells her, “That’s good. Thanks so much for letting me know. I’ll try to call him again, once he’s out.”

“I’m sorry, Kent,” Alicia states, and it sounds like she’s forced the words out, like they’ve been building for a long time and now is the first time that she’s willing to let herself say anything. “I shouldn’t have said those things to you.”

He doesn’t have to ask what she means, the memory of the waiting room continually fresh in his mind. _He is my son, and you should have known that comes before being whatever the fuck he is to you._

The words still have a bite to them, but Kent’s had enough distance now to not let himself be hurt. “It’s fine,” he says simply, because it is. None of them were okay, and Alicia lashed out at him. The surprising thing is that was the only outburst from any of them, really. “I get it.”

“That doesn’t make it okay. I wanted to let you know that I am sorry about it, though.” She pauses, exhales. “But thank you. We’ll give you a call closer to the actual date, I just thought you should know.”

“September 22,” Kent echoes, closing his eyes as he smiles. Relief floods through him as he thinks about it. It can’t be a coincidence that the day Jack gets out of rehab is the first day of fall. The summer will be over, the curse won’t hang over him for a year. Soon enough, he’ll have Jack once again.

“September 22,” Alicia confirms. “Goodbye, Kent.”

-x-

The preseason is nearly done, and Kent wakes up the morning of September 22 knowing that this is the day when everything changes. The curse will have shifted, the gods will give him sixteen years before he has to worry about this kind of thing again, and in those sixteen years he’ll have Jack.

It feels like a miracle he doesn’t deserve, that they’ve made it this far. That they’ll make it farther.

He ignored all the signs, didn’t see how Jack was hurting, didn’t make it obvious that he’d be there through everything, and he paid for it. He spent the summer paying for it, and now he knows enough not to repeat those mistakes. They’ll get sixteen years together, and Kent won’t be such a fuck up this time.

He’ll focus more on Jack, less on hockey. More on how Jack’s feeling, more on the ways that they work together. He won’t let himself get blinded by the future, because now he knows better.

This time, it’s going to work. The curse acted once using Jack, and Kent hopes that it’s a one-time deal. Next time it will take something else, which will hurt, but it could leave Jack alone. He’s torn between hating the gods for taking Jack away from him or thanking them that they’re going to give him back.

Jack can come to Vegas for a while, once they get everything worked out in Nova Scotia. Or maybe Kent will just fly to Montreal where Jack’s rehab center is, he doesn’t know yet. They’ll work the details out, though, those are the small things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of it all. Who cares where they got back together at so long as they get back together? Who cares about the summer from hell when there are going to be sixteen years to more than make up for it?

Last year, on the first day of fall, Kent waited outside Jack’s billet house for their first kiss.

This year, he can wait by a phone for their reunion.

-x-

When the phone does ring, it’s late in the evening and it’s Bob’s name that flashes on the screen, but Kent doesn’t really care whose phone Jack is calling from so long as he’s calling. Snatching it up, Kent answers it in one smooth motion and reaches out to pocket his car keys.

“Jack, hey,” he exclaims, out of breath from the sheer excitement.

It’s all going to come back together, as unbelievable as it sounds. Summers end, and curses take seventeen summers to reactivate, and tonight Kent’s going to fall asleep in Jack’s arms even if he has to sit through a layover in every airport in Canada if he has to do it. They’re going to come back together, and it’s going to be brilliant.

There’s a breath on the end other end of the line, and Kent unwillingly thinks of Jack in the hospital bed when he’d woken up and Kent was the only one there beside him. His scratchy voice is always going to linger in Kent’s memory, the soft curiosity and wonder at Kent being there.

“It’s Bob,” Bob says gruffly, and Kent freezes.

Maybe they haven’t told Jack that Kent could come, maybe they want it to be a surprise. Maybe Kent’s going to meet them in Nova Scotia or somewhere or something. “Hey,” Kent responds, waiting to be told what flight would be best for him to be on. He can book the ticket in the cab if he has to, and God knows that he won’t be able to keep himself sane for long enough to actually pack.

“I know Alicia said we’d call. We picked Jack up this morning.” He sounds hesitant, and Kent instinctively digs out a lighter he as walks over to the garden on the back patio.

It was stupid, but he should have done this sooner. He should have done this when he woke up, he should have stayed up until midnight last night and done it then. Carefully, Kent flicks it on and watches the flame waver before solidifying as he moves it over the plants.

“Yeah, she said that today was when the program finished,” Kent agrees, finally giving in and ripping a sprig of mint off the plant in the corner. He hadn’t wanted to bring any with him, but Angelica had talked him into it.

Bob goes silent for a moment, and Kent takes the plunge, lifting the sprig to the flame as it catches fire.

“He doesn’t want to see you,” Bob says, and Kent hears the words ever so faintly as he watches the smoke rise.

It takes a moment, because he feels like he’s been knocked over, like someone punched him in the face and he never saw it coming, not like this. “He doesn’t want to see me,” Kent echoes, eyes glued to the smoke as it drifts upwards and vanishes, only for more to take its place.

“I’m sorry, Kent,” Bob finishes, and the line goes dead.

“Oh,” Kent whispers and puts his phone back into his pocket on autopilot. Carefully, he looks at the broken piece of mint, withering above the flame, giving up its last gasps of life. He feels ashamed for some reason, having so thoughtlessly broken it. 

The mint plant is still growing, only barely contained by the planter that it’s gotten too big for. If Kent hadn’t be so careless, it would still be whole. He wonders if things with Jack could have been avoided in the same way, if there’s one action that he can look back to and blame everything on. Regardless of whether it was his fault of Jack’s, he thinks that would be easier: if there was one thing he could have focused on.

It’s not a curse that’s keeping them apart. Jack doesn’t want to see him, plain and simple.

There’s nothing magical about that, nothing to wait out or try to fix. Just something that exists in the world now, immovable and as unexplainable as everything else.

Looking down, Kent realizes that the mint sprig isn’t even there anymore. He shuts his lighter off and glances at his fingers carefully. They’re red and shiny, as though they’ve been burned, but Kent doesn’t feel anything.

-x-

The lights in the rink are almost blinding, and Kent hadn’t known to expect that. It’s not this bright in practice, and he can’t remember wincing any other time that they’ve come out. But it’s different, now.

His first real NHL game. He’s starting in his first real NHL game. The words don’t feel real, nothing feels real, not even the ground beneath his skates actually feels like it’s there, and he doesn’t know how he’s holding himself up anymore.

He hasn’t felt real since he saw the smoke rising from the mint sprig and heard Bob’s voice over the phone. _I’m sorry, Kent._ Time keeps passing, though, so the world can’t have come to a complete stop. _He doesn’t want to see you._ Somehow, he keeps breathing like there’s still oxygen around him.

The guys are murmuring in line, something about the Schooner’s defense, and that’s what makes this so much worse: Jack should be here. Kent doesn’t care how many times he thinks it, because it’s true. Jack should be here, about to come onto the ice, not in Nova Scotia where he’s refusing to pick up his fucking phone. They should be doing this together, like they said they would. Like they always said they would.

Instead, it’s just Kent.

He’s going to get used to it. Probably, one day he’ll get used to it, or get over it, or maybe they’re the same fucking thing. He’ll get over it or he won’t, and right now it doesn’t matter except that he’s not yet.

He doesn’t know when he will be.

The black uniform absorbs every bit of heat from the lights, and it’s a wonder that the ice is still actually ice instead of a pool of water waiting for them. He’s too warm, stifled in the heat, and everything is so bright as to be obnoxious. The roar of the crowd buzzes in his head as he tries to work through it.

It’s a game, same as always, only it’s not. It’s NHL, his first NHL game. He’s playing in the NHL, he’s not actively being cursed. It is everything that he wanted before he met Jack Zimmermann and learned how to want so much more.

The line moves, shifting forward until Kent’s at the front of the rink that’s so white that it’s blinding.

Schooling his expression away from a grimace, Kent forces a smile. Media-trained, he waves at the crowd and tries not to feel the throbbing pain in his head their yells are giving him, forces himself not to throw up. This is life without Jack Zimmermann, Kent realizes, and he steps onto the ice.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I feel the need to explain why I have Jack set as a year older than Kent in this. If Jack was born in 1990, his first year of eligibility for the draft would have been 2008. Ngozi first indicated that Kent was born in 1991 and then kind of said he was born in 1990 instead, and I've chosen 1991 because it would make no sense for both of the top draft picks in 2008 to push their entry date back a year. To work with that, I only had Jack push his entry date back a year.
> 
> I have a second part to this planned out, which will catch up to canon and possibly go beyond it, mainly showing Kent's career in Las Vegas, and will also show more of the Parson cousins.


End file.
